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Black Fly Season
 
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Black Fly Season (Hardcover)

by Giles Blunt (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 372 pages
  • Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd (17 Jan 2005)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0007151349
  • ISBN-13: 978-0007151349
  • Product Dimensions: 23 x 15.2 x 3.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 330,639 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Product Description

Review
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)

The Irish Independent, 8th January 2005
"Great stuff, action all the way in a wonderfully drawn impossibly remote location."

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What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

Black Fly Season
63% buy the item featured on this page:
Black Fly Season 4.0 out of 5 stars (3)
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Customer Reviews

3 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.0 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Writing on a tree stump in a hurricane? LOL!, 8 Mar 2005
One of the things that I enjoy about the Cardinal and Delorme books is the setting. Blunt is able to drop a reader right into Northern Ontario the same way that James Lee Burke puts you into the backwoods of Louisiana. I like this fellow's writing so much that I bought this one in the UK release rather than waiting the additional six months for the US edition, and I wasn't disappointed.

In Black Fly Season, Blunt continues to paint a vivid picture of his fictional small city of Algonquin Bay, contrasting it at times with metropolitan Toronto, which is about 200 miles away. Once again, the action scenes, as well as the forensic details, and the bureaucratic nuances of Canadian law enforcement are all firmly in place. There are several spots where the author shows a fantastic sense of humor, one chapter in particular containing some of the funniest exchanges I've read in a long time. The bad guys are perfectly evil, and the mysterious young woman who's shooting kicks off the investigation is, of course, much more complicated than she seems initially.

On the down side, while Cardinal continues to grow as a character, particularly when juxtaposed with his estranged, ingrate daughter and manic depressive wife, Delorme comes off a little one dimensional in this one. In the previous books, Delorme, in my opinion at least, showed as much depth and potential as Rankin's Siobhan Clarke, however, in Black Fly Season, that kind of character work appears to have been omitted. This notwithstanding, the book is an excellent read with short, well-paced chapters, and a plot that could easily be adapted for the big screen. I'm looking forward to the next book in this series.

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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Black Fly Season, Giles Blunt, 14 Feb 2005
By RachelWalker "RachelW" (England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)   
I can't quite say why I give this novel four stars instead of five. I enjoyed reading it, and Giles Blunt's writing is absolutely brilliant. The writing alone is enough to reccomend his work, enough to allow for great enjoyment: it's slick and smooth and warm and easy and clever and human and very clean. Cardinal's a great protagonist, and his relationship with his manic wife is superb, and Blunt renders it with great empathy. It's all very moving.

Though, while Blunt fires on all guns elsewhere, the plot is just okay. It has a great deal of potential, and indeed starts off very well: but it wasn't particularly interesting, really. Certainly not as much as in previous books. THe central idea of a woman turning in a town, up who cannot remember who she is, or almost anything at all, and yet seems to have had a serious attempt made against her life, is a great one, but Blunt doesn't marry it to any other plot strands of like quality. The rest, really, is a bit predictable, and not too interesting. I never was particularly interested in stories about drugs and drug-running and gangs.

I'd wait for the paperback (certainly, the quality of the hardback leaves a lot to be desires: HarperCollins could put in a bit more effort with the cover, I must say), but I'd still reccomend reading it.

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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Guaranteed Quality, 29 Dec 2005
By T. Oksanen (Helsinki, Finland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Black Fly Season (Paperback)
I Like Cardinal and Delorme. I like that this book takes place in Canada. The story flows easily. Somehow I get the feeling that the books before this one were more complex. The start of the book is great. But then story gets a bit ordinary. Drug addicts aren’t that interesting. But Blunt didn’t lose me I just hope that the wait for his next book doesn’t take that long.
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