Order of Jack Batten Books

Jack Batten is a Canadian author best known for writing the Crang Mystery series of books. Batten had mostly written non-fiction until the 1980s when he began writing his fiction series. The Crang series began in 1987 with the release of Crang Plays the Ace.

Prior to his work as an author, Batten was a lawyer in Toronto. He considered this to be unhappy years and eventually left to pursue a career in writing. He wrote many non-fiction books about the law and court cases in Canada before turning to fiction.

Publication Order of Crang Mystery Books

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

If You Like Jack Batten Books, You’ll Love…

• Jeffrey Archer
• Michael Connelly
• Elmore Leonard

Crang Plays the Ace introduces us to Crang, a criminal laywer who loves jazz, old movies, vodka, and his girlfriend Annie. He’s a “wise-cracking WASP” who goes more off of his own code than the Law Society of Upper Canada. The kind of clients that he usually gets are small-time criminals who are usually guilty and he likes it that way. These clients are grateful when he gets them off. However, this case is a bit different when a wealthy financier comes in with a unique problem: his $300,000 investment in Ace Disposal Services is too profitable.

Batten is also the author of Silent in an Evil Time: The Brave War of Edith Cavell. The story follows the nurse and resistance fighter, Edith Cavell. She was a matron of an institute for nurses at the beginning of World War I. With her intelligence and sense of duty, she was able to transform the institute into a leading training center. When an organization was formed to assist British and French soldiers trapped behind German lines, Edith was asked to help. Her hospital was used to shelter escaping soldiers and keep them from the Germans, arranging a secret route through Holland. Edith was responsible for a thousand soldiers making their way home, but she was eventually caught and would become a rallying point for the war.