From Publishers Weekly
Blunt forgoes the shock and violence of his previous crime novel, Forty Words for Sorrow (winner of the British Crime Writers' Macallan Silver Dagger Award), in this standout sequel-though one might not think so after reading the grisly opening. Det. John Cardinal of the Algonquin Bay, Ontario, police force is called in to investigate the severed arm of a white male that has been dragged out of the woods by a neighborhood dog. After the remaining pieces of the body turn up and the man is identified as an American citizen, John and his French-Canadian partner, Lise Delorme, are immersed in a case that involves more bodies, a 30-year-old unsolved murder with ties to the violently separatist Quebec Liberation Front, and clashes among various law enforcement agencies, including the Mounties, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the local police. There are also the ordinary and extraordinary personal problems of the wonderfully drawn characters. Cardinal's wife is clinically depressed, and his father is sick. Lise's ethnicity does not help her win the trust of the locals. The novel's fascination lies not only in the meticulous unspooling of the plot, but in watching Cardinal and Delorme uncover the lattice of events linking the political clashes of the past and the covered-up crimes of the present. The detectives maneuver gingerly through a beautiful but dangerous landscape frozen beneath the weight of a once-in-a-century ice storm. In a genre where writers often compete to create vile, loathsome villains perpetrating outrageous crimes, Blunt stands as a master craftsman who shows us not only darkness, but also decency.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* A North Woods of derelict trapper lodges and dangerous bars, where damp and cold pervade everything, forms a convincingly cruel background for a mystery in which one body is set out for bears to dismember and another is placed, naked, in the middle of a copse of trees. The setting is the tiny town of Algonquin Bay in northern Ontario, and the heroes, introduced in Blunt's acclaimed first novel,
Forty Words for Sorrow (2001), are homicide detectives John Cardinal and Lise Delorme. They are a first-rate duo, free from the usual male cop-female cop stereotypes, and they react to one another professionally and genuinely. This time two homicides within the same week land on the detectives' plate; one victim is identified as an American accountant while the other, a woman, is the town's most capable doctor. Cardinal has still more worries, both professional (the imminent discharge from prison of a drug dealer with a grudge against him) and personal (an ailing father and a manic-depressive wife). Blunt is adept at spinning a web of horror and impending doom, but he also knows how to spice his tale with humor (Cardinal telling a maladroit bank robber that he must have made off with "tens of dollars") and human detail (Cardinal facing his domestic difficulties with grace and dignity). This one works on every level.
Connie FletcherCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
