There are books that entertain, books that educate, and books that force us to examine the moral condition of the institutions around us. Hank Idsinga’s The High Road: Confessions of a Homicide Cop is one of those rare books that does all three.

At one level, it is the memoir of one of the Toronto Police Service’s most accomplished homicide detectives, a decorated investigator who rose through the ranks to lead the legendary homicide squad and helped solve some of the city’s most notorious murder cases, including the Bruce McArthur investigation. But to read this book only as a policing memoir is to miss its deeper purpose entirely.

This is a story about inherited trauma, conscience, prejudice, courage, and the lifelong pursuit of justice.

Long before Hank Idsinga became a homicide detective, he was a young boy growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust. He eventually came to understand that he was the descendant of a Jewish grandfather imprisoned and murdered in a Nazi death camp. Like so many children and grandchildren of survivors, Idsinga inherited more than family stories. He inherited anxiety, caution, abhorrence of conflict, and an instinctive understanding that hatred unchecked can destroy entire worlds.

We are somewhat alike, Idsinga and I. Like me, as a child, he experienced nightmares of swastikas and gas chambers. His parents discouraged even the use of the word “hate” because they knew exactly where hatred could lead. Yet somewhere inside that postwar inheritance, another instinct quietly formed. One day Hank read a Time magazine article about Simon Wiesenthal and the hunt for Nazi war criminals. He turned to his mother and announced that he wanted to become someone who “caught the bad guys.”

That moment became the moral foundation of his life.

I understood it immediately because I too am the child of a Holocaust survivor. My father’s experiences shaped my own life in profound ways. Like Idsinga, I grew up carrying inherited memory and an unspoken sense of unfinished justice. His road led him into policing. Mine led me into social work, child protection, anti-racism advocacy, and community defence work. Different paths perhaps, but driven by the same internal engine, the belief that hatred cannot simply be ignored and hoped away.

That is why this book affected me so deeply.

Listen to Ellin Bessner’s interview with Hank Idsinga on a recent episode of North Star.

One of the great strengths of Confessions of a Homicide Cop is that Idsinga........

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