The Ferryman Will Be There: An Ellis Portal Mystery.

Michael Payne is head of the Research and Publications Program at the
Historic Sites and Archives Service, Alberta Community Development, and
the co-author of A Narrative History of Fort Dunvegan.

This is the third of Aubert’s Toronto-based mystery series featuring
Ellis Portal. As the opening lines make clear, Portal is an unusual
character. A former judge, Portal sank into drug and alcohol abuse and
lost everything—family, house, job, even his Armani suits—before
bottoming out as a street person living in a ravine. This particular
form of urban bilingualism and biculturalism, combining street person
with establishment drone, makes Portal very useful to the Toronto
police. When called upon, he can act as a semi-official liaison between
the police and a community that does not like cops very much and speaks
a different language.

This gives Portal purpose and direction, and in the novel he is
hovering somewhere between his ravine life and his old life. He is not
entirely comfortable with either, which allows Aubert to explore his
relationships with significant people from both worlds, particularly his
son and Queenie and Tootie, two friends from the street. In many
respects, the mystery in the book is more a device to explore Portal’s
conflicted life than the central purpose of the novel.

The mystery itself revolves around the shooting of a prominent local
filmmaker at the Toronto Film Festival and the disappearance of his
daughter, who is both the star of his film and a seriously damaged young
woman. Finding the girl and unraveling her disturbing secret life means
discovering why her father was killed and who did it. For Portal, this
also means confronting his past and making some plans for the
future—thus neatly foreshadowing Portal’s next mystery.