The Delicate Storm

Book 2 in the John Cardinal series When the dismembered corpse of an American tourist turns up half-eatenby bears near Algonquin Bay, Detective John Cardinal is assigned to thecase. Without a solid lead, and with the RCMP and CSIS involved,Cardinal is forced to band together with his nemesis, Sergeant MalcolmMusgrave, to untangle the deceit and cover-ups surrounding the case. Thena well-respected local woman is found frozen under a glaze of ice in thewoods, and Cardinal realizes that the two very different murders may well beconnected. Working closely with his trusted colleague, Detective Lise Delorme, to whomhe feels a dangerous attraction, Cardinal fights his emotions and a relentless icestorm only to uncover a knot of lies and conspiracies that go back more thanthirty years and extend to the highest reaches of Canadian intelligence.

Stylish, atmospheric psychological thriller following on from the Silver Dagger Award winner, Forty Words for Sorrow.

When the dismembered corpse of an American tourist turns up half eaten by bears near Algonquin Bay, Detective John Carndinal is assigned to the case.

Now a major television series, CARDINAL, and the first book in the John Cardinal series. When four teenagers go missing in the small northern town of Algonquin Bay, the extensive police investigation comes up empty. Everyone is ready to give up except Detective John Cardinal, an all-too-human loner whose persistence only serves to get him removed from homicide. Haunted by a criminal secret in his own past and hounded by a special investigation into corruption on the force, Cardinal is on the brink of losing his career—and his family. Then the mutilated body of thirteen-year-old Katie Pine is pulled out of an abandoned mineshaft. And only Cardinal is willing to consider the horrible truth: that this quiet town is home to the most vicious of serial killers. The case as it unfolds proves eerily reminiscent of the Moors murders in Britain, as an unassuming young man and his belligerently loyal girlfriend scout young victims for their macabre games. With the media, the provincial police and his own department questioning his every move, Cardinal follows increasingly tenuous threads towards the unthinkable. Time isn't only running out for him, but for another young victim, tied up in a basement wondering when and how his captors will kill him.

Book 3 in the John Cardinal series It’s spring in Algonquin Bay, and the blackflies are driving people a little mad. Detectives John Cardinal and Lise Delorme have a strange case on their hands: a young woman has wandered bug-bitten out of the Algonquin Bay bush with a gunshot wound to the head. Cardinal becomes obsessed with finding out who the woman is and who is trying to kill her. When the body of a local biker, Wombat Guthrie, is found in a cave, it seems the two cases are related—and the link appears to be a drug dealer and self-proclaimed shaman who calls himself Red Bear.

It's not unusual for John Cardinal to be hauled out of a warm bed on a cold night in Algonquin Bay to investigate a murder. And at first this dead body, sprawled in the parking lot of Motel 17, looks pretty run of the mill: the corpse has a big bootprint on his neck, and the likely suspect is his lover's outraged husband. But the lover has gone missing. And then Delorme, following a hunch, locates another missing woman, a senator's wife from Ottawa, frozen in the ruins of an abandoned hotel way back in the woods. Spookily, she was chained up and abandoned wearing a new winter parka and boots, with a thermos beside her--as if her murderer was giving her a whisper of a chance at survival. Neither Delorme nor Cardinal can imagine where their investigation will lead: into a decades-old injustice committed in the high Arctic; into the swingers' world inhabited by an ex-rock star who owns a pub in Algonquin Bay as well as private members' clubs in Toronto and Ottawa; into the insecurity that afflicts Delorme the woman and the cop; and into the deep bond between Delorme and Cardinal, which is at real risk of coming undone. In Until the Night, Giles Blunt outdoes himself, creating a masterpiece of crime fiction that will not only haunt his fans and readers, but delight and amaze them too.

Book 5 in the John Cardinal series A year after the death of his beloved and troubled wife, Catherine, John Cardinal has moved into a new, but very humid, condo. He has fallen into an easy routine of work on cold case files and platonic movie nights with friend and colleague Lise Delorme. The quiet of a snow-covered Algonquin Bay is shattered when the decapitated bodies of two people are found in a summer home on Trout Lake. The victims, visitors from Russia, are in Algonquin Bay attending the annual fur auction. This is by no means a routine murder investigation as Cardinal soon discovers, but a horrific piece of a very twisted puzzle. Blunt has, once again, given us a page-turning plot, a remarkable cast of characters and the comfort of John Cardinal at the helm.

Book 2 in the John Cardinal series When the dismembered corpse of an American tourist turns up half-eatenby bears near Algonquin Bay, Detective John Cardinal is assigned to thecase. Without a solid lead, and with the RCMP and CSIS involved,Cardinal is forced to band together with his nemesis, Sergeant MalcolmMusgrave, to untangle the deceit and cover-ups surrounding the case. Thena well-respected local woman is found frozen under a glaze of ice in thewoods, and Cardinal realizes that the two very different murders may well beconnected. Working closely with his trusted colleague, Detective Lise Delorme, to whomhe feels a dangerous attraction, Cardinal fights his emotions and a relentless icestorm only to uncover a knot of lies and conspiracies that go back more thanthirty years and extend to the highest reaches of Canadian intelligence.