Robert Rotenberg is a criminal lawyer, former magazine publisher, and the author the bestselling novel Old City Hall, which was published in 2009. Rotenberg, whose new novel is called The Guilty Plea, will be guest editing The Afterword this week.

When I was in my last year of high school I wrote an essay comparing the tremendous film, The Last Picture Show — which is set in a bleak, dying, West Texas town — to the spineless Canadian movies being made at the time – all financed by tax breaks given to doctors and dentist, all set in what can only be described as Nowheresville U.S.A. I talked about how important location was to great drama. How without a strong sense of place, stories weren’t real. Compelling.

So decades later, when I finally sat down to start writing my own novels, I was bound and determined to set them here. Now. In Toronto. This despite being told repeatedly that books set in Canada would never sell internationally.Perhaps I’m just pigheaded. But let me tell you a secret. For me it’s fun to hang out a five in the morning at the Calabrese Bakery on Dundas Street West. Eat lunch at the Vesta Lunch on Dupont, a restaurant I must have driven past a thousand times. Wander around the Ontario Food Terminal, truly one of the great unseen-by-most-people places in this city.

Accuracy matters. Every detail. Near the climax of my first book, Old City Hall, there’s a scene on a Toronto Island ferryboat. As initially written, I had the big tug tooting its horn twice. Just before I finished the final draft, I took another ride to double-check. Sure enough, it only blows its horn once. So I had to rewrite.

Two winters ago I made a number of train trips up to Cobalt Ontario. I rarely take notes. Preferring to just look, listen and try to feel what’s going on around me. But a year later when I was at home reading the final galleys, I saw that I’d described the ticket taker wearing a blue-and-white striped shirt. Being on a tight deadline, I called up Ontario Northland and got a lovely operator in North Bay.

“This is going to be your most unusual call of the month,” I told her. I then explained that I was a writer, and would she mind listening to a short passage.

“Only if you let me put you on speaker phone,” she said.

Thus I gave the first reading of my new book, The Guilty Plea. It was a long excerpt that ended with these words:

…They glided to a stop. The ticket taker swung the door open and tossed out a metal step. The station was about a hundred yards farther down the track. Kennicott pointed to the station, which featured an overhanging slat roof and a wide stone porch. “Here?” “’Fraid so.” The man wore a blue-and-white striped shirt with ONTARIO NORTHLAND across the breast pocket and the name HAMISH sewn in above it. “Everyone says the same thing first time. Station’s a beauty. Been closed for years.”

There was a prolonged silence on the other end of the line. Finally I asked: “Did I get the shirt right?”

“The shirt?” she said. “Yes. You got everything right. We were all listening. It was as if we were there.”

Before Old City Hall came out, I got one of my first author’s blurb from the bestselling writer Jeffery Deaver, who wrote: “Robert Rotenberg does for Toronto what Ian Rankin does for Edinburgh.”

I was so touched by that quote. And when my Canadian publisher put it on the cover on my new book, I felt like I’d come full circle.