Black Fly Season (Hardcover)

Reviews of Forty Words for Sorrow 'Intensely vivid characters, terrible crimes and a brutal deep-frozen landscape all prove beyond a reasonable doubt that cold nurtures good and evil as readily as heat!and that Giles Blunt is a really tremendous crime novelist' Lee Child 'One of the finest crime novels I've ever read. Giles Blunt writes with uncommon grace, style and compassion and he plots like a demon. This book as it all -- unforgettable characters, beautiful language, throat-constricting suspense' Jonathan Kellerman '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 'A fine debut that deserves to do well, and promises much from a talented new author' Jim Driver, Time Out 'A superior Canadian police procedural with an evocative sense of place: the frozen lakes and forests are as integral to the plot as the flawed detective ! an impressive achievement' Maxim Jakubowski, Guardian

A woman with a bullet in her brain can't remember who she is or who put it there. The black flies are swarming and biting, making everyone in Ontario's tiny Algonquin Bay miserable-except for the redhead who's lost all memory and affect since someone shot her. Homicide detectives John Cardinal and Lise Delorme have Red sequestered, a guard at her door, while they try to figure out who wanted her dead. Their inquiries lead to the Viking Raiders, a group of bikers into local drug distribution until a rival group usurps them, dismembering Wombat Guthrie along the way. The next to be disarticulated is Toof, who unwisely bragged about his mates' big plans before he met a death marked by the sadism of the Palo Mayombe, a Cuban sect into human sacrifice. Her memory returned, Red decamps, desperate to contact her brother, a heroin addict; Cardinal's depressive wife Catherine again needs hospitalization; a member of the RCMP is on the take; and the deadly Red Bear and his acolyte Leon have plans that involve hatchets, knives and vats of boiling blood. Clearly Algonquin Bay and its citizenry are under siege, not the least by vicious black flies. If the macabre plot, based on a true-crime episode, seems more rote than its predecessors (The Delicate Storm, 2003, etc.), Blunt redeems himself with his searing portrait of a cop unable to prevent his wife's self-destruction. (Kirkus Reviews)

"Great stuff, action all the way in a wonderfully drawn impossibly remote location."