(2001)Pretty good police proc. located in the winter in Ontario. Kids are disappearing and one is found frozen in the ice of nearby lake. Small town police force tries to investigate while avoiding the heavy handed approach of the RCMP. Also one of the detectives is believed to be taking bribes or stealing and this complicates the investigation. (Amazon.com) It gets dark early in Algonquin Bay. Take a drive up Airport Hill at four o' clock on a February afternoon, and when you come back half an hour later the streets of the city will glitter below you in the dark like so many runways. The forty-sixth parallel may not be all that far north; you can be much farther north and still be in the United States, and even London, England, is a few degrees closer to the North Pole. But this is Ontario, Canada, we're talking about, and Algonquin Bay in February is the very definition of winter. Algonquin Bay is snowbound, Algonquin Bay is quiet, Algonquin Bay is very, very cold.Read the evocative opening of Giles Blunt's novel and you may begin to understand why Tony Hillerman says this is the novel he wishes he'd written. Keep reading, and you may wonder why other authors haven't joined the vicarious narrative line. With devastating precision, Blunt effortlessly weaves together strands of lives both led and taken in this tiny Canadian town, limning a hauntingly paradoxical picture of isolation and community, two sides of a fragile bulwark against violence.John Cardinal was taken off homicide investigation after a fruitless and expensive quest for 13-year-old Katie Pine, a Chippewa girl who disappeared from the nearby reservation. After months of insisting that Katie was no runaway, Cardinal receives the cold comfort of vindication in the form of Katie's corpse, discovered in an abandoned mine shaft. But the case, when reopened, becomes a Pandora's box of horror. Katie's body is only the first to be found, as Cardinal uncovers a pattern that links her death to those of two other children. When another boy is reported missing, Cardinal knows he is in a race against time to find the killer (so trite a phrase, while technically accurate, does radical injustice to Blunt's razor-sharp plot and eerily pragmatic balance between the cop and his prey).His new partner, Lise Delorme, is trying to uncover her own pattern. Drafted by the RCMP to find proof that Cardinal has been accepting money from drug runner Kyle Corbett to derail the Mounties' investigations (three attempted busts good for absolutely nothing), she sifts through the minutiae of Cardinal's life. Proud father, loving husband, dedicated officer--at what price has this edifice been constructed? Suffice it to say that Cardinal's past and present link him in ironic counterpoint to those people for whom he is inevitably the bearer of bad tidings, leaving them "trying to recognize each other through the smoke and ashes" of grief.Blunt has created a world in which every conversation can seem as ominous as the moan of the wind and the bullet-like report of shifting lake ice ("It was a new art form for Delorme, picking shards of fact from the exposed hearts of the bereaved. She looked at Cardinal for help, but he said nothing. He thought, "Get used to it."). But it is also a world whose bleak landscape is touched with unexpected humor. Witness this description of one of the many minor, but always beautifully detailed, characters who populate the novel's pages: "Arthur 'Woody' Wood was not in the burglary business to enhance his social life. Like all professional burglars, he went to great lengths to avoid meeting people on the job. At other times, well, Woody was as sociable as the next fellow."Part police procedural, part psychological thriller, part exploration of a region's landscape and people, the novel is an astonishing, powerful hybrid-- worthy of far more than a mere 40 words of praise.

I saw the first series of Cardinal, the TV adaptation of Forty Words For Sorrow, a few years ago and enjoyed the way it created an atmosphere of distrust and threat that was partly embodied by the fierce cold weather in which most of the action took place.

It turns out that the TV version was fairly faithful to the book but there were, inevitably, simplifications so there was enough about the book that was different to keep it feeling fresh.

Both of the main detectives, John Cardinal and Lise Delorme, are well-drawn. They come across as believably human and they are quite different from one another: age, gender and ethnic background. I liked how their relationship developed from a starting point of (well-deserved) mutual suspicion to something that might become a partnership, albeit a partnership between two naturally solitary people.

There was a focus on mental health in the book that felt a little off-kilter. The killers are depicted as psychotic. Cardinal's wife is bipolar. Cardinal himself verges on paranoid (although people really are out to get him) and Delorme has an exceptionally low now for association which, if it's not pathological, certainly puts her in a mental minority. None of this was badly done but it did feel a little as if poor mental health was the main cause of sorrow in this book. In my experience, it's more often the other way around.

The atmosphere of the novel was dolorous but not hopeless. The bleak winter weather and the mostly rural landscape are almost characters in their own right.

The plot was twisty and there are a couple of side plots to make things interesting. I'll be back for the rest of the series. ( )

Summary: When a missing teenager’s body is found in a mineshaft, John Cardinal is re-assigned to a case he’d been pulled off of and is joined by Lise DeLorme, who is also investigating him for corruption. Meanwhile, facts point to a serial killer when another body turns up and another missing youth is traced to their community.

John Cardinal had been investigating the disappearance of a girl, Katie Pine, that he’d linked to another missing youth. When the search threatened to absorb most of the Algonquin Bay police department resources, he was taken off the case. No other leads developed until now. Then a body was found, frozen in ice in an abandoned mine shaft. and identified as Katie Pine. He is put back on the case. We learn the depths of how much Cardinal cares about his work, and about the victims of crime in this interior monologue after he tells Katie’s widowed mother that her body has been found:

“Eskimos, it is said, have forty different words for snow. Never mind about snow, Cardinal mused, what people really need is forty words for sorrow. Grief. Heartbreak. Desolation. There were not enough for this childless mother in her empty house.”

BLUNT, P. 37

Cardinal has been assigned a partner from Special Investigations, Lise DeLorme. Sharp, observant, and strikingly attractive, it turns out she is investigating Cardinal on the quiet. After several frustrated attempts to bust a major credit card fraud operation, it becomes apparent someone is tipping off the suspect, a man by the name of Corbett. Cardinal suspects the investigation though DeLorme denies it. And there is something suspicious about this apparently diligent, caring cop. His wife is in an expensive psychiatric facility and he has a daughter in an art program at Yale. And all this on a cop’s salary. Yet as DeLorme comes to work with him, it seems out of character.

Their investigation leads them to see a link with one and possibly two other missing youth. They find another body. Then the girlfriend of another young man shows up. He had been headed to Algonquin Bay and had failed to stay in touch. It looks like they are hunting for a serial killer. Will they find the killer before there is another victim? They may have some time, but not a lot–it appears that the killer likes to play with the victims before administering slow, torturous deaths.

Unbeknownst to Cardinal and DeLorme, they are looking for two people, a twisted young man who already has a record as a child for killing animals and a needy, unattractive young woman who has been taken in thrall with both the man and his cult-like fascination with torture and murder. As DeLorme and Cardinal investigate, tension rachets up as we follow the killers in their plans to “party” with Keith London, the missing young man. The plot moves back and forth between the killers and the detectives, with the investigation DeLorme is pursuing on Cardinal in the background and Cardinal’s own troubled conscience raising further apprehensions.

Blunt plots this masterfully, developing the relationship between Cardinal and DeLorme from initial distrust to growing admiration that stays professional. Cardinal is faithful to his wife–even when she thinks herself worthless in her illness. We find ourselves rooting for them, not only to catch the killer(s), but for Cardinal to be cleared and for them to be able to trust each other. Blunt combines a fascinating police procedural with characters we care about and a psycho-thriller with truly evil killers and a young man with a girlfriend who loves him who we desperately want to survive.

[BTW, thanks BT for the gift of a great read!] ( )

Run of the mill serial killer novel..... ( )

The title comes from a comparison to the Eskimo language. If there are forty words for snow, surely somewhere out there there are forty words that mean sorrow. John Cardinal is a flawed small town Canadian cop fixated on solving the mystery of the disappearance of a teenager girl. Maybe it was the thought of his own daughter that originally drove him, but Cardinal's obsession to solve the case depleted department resources and ultimately got him transferred out of homicide and into the burglary and petty crimes division. Meanwhile, another teenager goes missing. Then another. Suddenly, Cardinal's obsession, thirteen year old Katie Pine's remains are found. Maybe he was onto something after all? Is this the work of a serial killer? This time John is back on the case with a rookie for a partner (is it Lise or Lisa?) who might be investigating him.
This all would be a typical story of a dedicated office with an I-told-you-so attitude but Cardinal is a cop with a complicated life and a dirty secret his partner is determined to uncover. Can he solve the crime(s) before his personal life crashes down around him? His daughter is attending Yale on illegal funds, his wife's mental instability has landed her in an expensive in-patient hospital, and yet another individual has been found murdered. John asks again, is there a serial killer operating out of the tiny town of Algonquin Bay? Can Cardinal close the case before his colleagues close in on him?
Not a spoiler alert: I appreciate that Blunt leaves the ending open. Cardinal's crimes are not wrapped up in an all-is-forgiven-because-you-are-a-hero bow. There is room for Cardinal to make a comeback and face his demons. ( )