John Cardinal Books
“One of the best novels of [the year]. . . Giles Blunt has a tremendous talent.” —Tony Hillerman “Forceful . . . surprising . . . [Blunt’s] insights into suffering and madness give his characters their true voice.” — The New York Times In the quiet Canadian town of Algonquin Bay, a frozen body has been found in an abandoned mine shaft. She is quickly identified as Katie Pine, a teenager who had disappeared months ago. At the time, Detective John Cardinal insisted that Katie was no ordinary runaway. His relentless pursuit and refusal to give up on the case got him demoted from Homicide. But now the Canadian police force wants Cardinal back on the case—with a new associate by his side. And as these two untrusting partners gather evidence of a serial murder spree, a pair of sociopaths is closing in on the next victim. Winner of The Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction Nominated for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel
In the wake of a dual murder during a freak winter warm spell, Algonquin Bay homicide detectives Delorme and Cardinal link the killings to other unsolved murders spanning back some thirty years, a case with possible connections to Quebec terrorist activities. Reprint.
Only someone dumb or high would go out unprotected during Algonquin Bay’s black fly season. But when a beautiful young woman covered in bites stumbles into a tavern, the local cops discover she is neither. The woman has a bullet in her brain—and no memory of how it happened or who she is. Homicide detectives John Cardinal and Lise Delorme know someone left her for dead. And if word gets out that she isn’t, someone will try again.
In Algonquin Bay, Detective John Cardinal suffers a devastating loss. He arrives at a grisly crime scene only to discover that the victim is his own wife, who left a suicide note at the scene. But when Cardinal begins to receive a series of threatening letters, he suspects that his wife may not have taken her own life—and that there may be more to her suicide note than meets the eye. While Cardinal takes time to grieve, his partner, Sargeant Lise Delorme, is investigating a high-profile sex crime involving a young girl whose abuse is being broadcast online—and who appears to be a resident of Algonquin Bay. Things are heating up in this quiet, costal town as both Delorme and Cardinal find themselves tracking predators so diabolical that the accepted bounds of criminal justice no longer apply….
The long-awaited new instalment in the award-winning, bestselling John Cardinal mystery 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. From the Hardcover edition.
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.