The Delicate Storm - Hardcover

Blunt, Giles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679310584 ISBN 13: 9780679310587

Publisher: Random House Canada, 2003

Synopsis

...there is nothing more still than a dead body, and no mistaking it for anything else. This one was naked, covered with a glaze of ice. Even the long black hair that fell in tendrils across her face was encased in ice. It was as if she were under a spell–the victim of a jealous wizard, a wicked witch. [The Delicate Storm, page 164]

Algonquin Bay is wrapped in a thick blanket of fog; an eerie prophecy of weather on its way, or perhaps something more ominous. When a local man discovers a dismembered arm in his front yard, it seems that the long fingers of fog that strangle the city are also hiding a grisly secret. While at first the discovery is thought to be the work of ravenous bears, woken early from their long winter hibernation, the coroner later confirms that the victim was actually sawn into pieces rather torn. The case becomes even murkier when a local trapper confesses to cutting up the body and scattering the remains but claims to be innocent of committing the murder.

Detectives John Cardinal and Lise Delorme have their work cut out for them. After identifying the victim as Howard Matlock, New York city resident, a new player enters the ring: the RCMP. In any case involving an American, the RCMP shares jurisdiction with the Algonquin Bay Police Department and that means Corporal Malcolm Musgrave. A blustering wall of self-importance and attitude, Musgrave has Cardinal bristling, and he reminds Delorme of a betrayal she’d rather forget. To add insult to injury, Delorme is pulled off the case and Cardinal ends up in a partnership not only with Musgrave, but with the unbearably obsequious Calvin Squier, an agent of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

When Cardinal makes the surprising discovery that Howard Matlock is alive and well, he begins to suspect that not everyone involved in the case is working towards the same goal. The body parts add up to one Miles Shakeley, a CIA operative in Montreal in 1970, and Cardinal becomes suspicious that CSIS is somehow involved.
Meanwhile, the case of a missing woman in Algonquin Bay is occupying Delorme. When the body of Dr. Winter Cates is uncovered in a glaze of ice, Delorme is convinced that a jealous boyfriend is to blame. But when blood evidence bonds Cardinal and Delorme’s cases, they are back together and travelling to Montreal to track down tenuous leads. And it is there that they discover that their cases reach far beyond the town limits of Algonquin Bay. Untangling the secrets of a government in crisis, cover-ups, and the meddling of American intelligence agencies, they are eventually led back to where they started–and to a suspect who is untouchable.

About this title

Review:

In The Delicate Storm, it's January in the northern Ontario town of Algonquin Bay, and the foul smell of murder permeates the chilly air when the remains of a bear's dinner in the woods turns out to be the body of an American tourist with a shadowy past. Time for Detective John Cardinal to track down the scent. The mystery deepens when another corpse, that of local doctor Winter Cates, is discovered in the same woods, and Cardinal suspects a link. Unearthing the connection takes Cardinal back to a very different time and place: Montreal circa 1970, a city gripped by the fear of separatist violence. A single incident from that era turns out to have deadly repercussions in Algonquin Bay 30 years later.

Giles Blunt's first thriller to feature John Cardinal, Forty Words for Sorrow, was an international hit, which earned Blunt the British Crime Writers' Macallan Silver Dagger Award. With The Delicate Storm, Blunt delivers another imaginative and entertaining mystery. The author honed his craft writing scripts for such popular TV crime series as Law and Order and Street Legal, and his tight plotting is neatly complemented by a vivid yet never overly extravagant writing style. His depictions of the political scenes of both Quebec in the 70s and contemporary Ontario are fascinating (he shows a deep contempt for his novel's neo-conservative Ontario premier, Geoff Mantis, who bears a striking resemblance to a recent real-life premier from Blunt's hometown of North Bay). He is less successful when exploring the sexual tension between Cardinal and colleague Lise Delorme. Creating a plumbing problem in a hotel so they must share a room is just a little forced.

Toward the end of The Delicate Storm, the author explains how to avoid being electrocuted by downed power lines. That makes it a book that could literally save your life. Failing that, The Delicate Storm is certain to provide you with hours of pleasurable reading. --Kerry Doole, Amazon.ca

Review:

Praise for Forty Words for Sorrow

‘Extraordinary for its psychology and tensions. Giles Blunt manages to inhabit the minds of killer, victim and investigator alike, a feat that very few writers can manage. It moves his work to a different level’ Jane Jakeman, Independent

‘A taut and enthralling tale that is as dark as the Canadian winter setting is cold. Humane, intelligent and gripping, Forty Words for Sorrow is a haunting journey into the human heart in all its complexities’ Val McDermid

‘This Canadian novel is as fine a police procedural as any written in the USA and doesn’t rely on others for ideas – it comes across as fresh as morning dew ... never less than fascinating throughout’ Mark Timlin, Independent on Sunday

‘A highly professional tour-de-force: excellently plotted, with fleshed-out characters and a well-portrayed, interesting setting’ TJ Binyon, Evening Standard

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Canada
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0679310584
• ISBN 13: 9780679310587
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304