John Cardinal Series by Giles Blunt (Books #1-5)

Book Preface

Forty Words for Sorrow (#1)
When the decomposed body of 13-year-old Katie Pine is found in an abandoned mine shaft, Detective John Cardinal is vindicated. He’d kept the Pine case open, and was demoted for his zeal. But Katie isn’t the only youngster to disappear in the Canadian town of Algonquin Bay. Cardinal is allowed to reopen the files on three other lost kids. When another youth goes missing, he sees a pattern that screams “serial killer.”

The Delicate Storm (#2)
Stylish, atmospheric psychological police thriller featuring detectives Cardinal and Delorme ‘It lay there, fishbelly white, hair curling along one side. Toward the wrist end, the flesh still bore the zigzag impression of a watch with an expandable bracelet. Even though there was no hand attached, there was no doubt that the thing lying in Ivan Bergeron’s backyard was a human arm.’ The gruesome discovery in the wilderness above Algonquin Bay is assumed to be the work of bears. Until the search for body parts leads detectives Cardinal and Delorme to a remote trapper’s cabin that has served as an abbattoir for a cold-blooded human predator. Until the woods give up a second body, naked and shrouded in ice. Having narrowly survived an RCMP investigation into police corruption, John Cardinal is less than thrilled when the first victim is identified as a US citizen and the Mounties are called in to assist. It’s the Canadian Secret Service, however, that pose the real problem. Is their interference in the case merely a question of preserving jurisdiction over cases involving terrorism – or something more sinister? Even the elements seem to be conspiring against the police, with Northern Ontario in the grip of an ice storm of once-in-a-hundred-years severity. The woods take on a glittering, lethal beauty, the eerie silence broken only by the crash of falling branches and power lines. And against this backdrop Cardinal comes face to face with a killer.

Black Fly Season (#3)
When a woman stumbles into a tavern, covered in black fly bites, with a bullet in her brain and no memory, homicide detectives John Cardinal and Lisa Delorme know someone left her for dead. And if word gets out that she isn’t, someone will try again

By The Time You Read This (#4) aka The Fields of Grief
Autumn has arrived in Algonquin Bay, and with it an unusual spate of suicides. The most shocking victim yet is Detective John Cardinal’s wife, who has finally succumbed to her battle with manic depression. As Cardinal takes time to grieve, his partner, Lise Delorme, handles an unsavory assignment: a young girl appears in a series of unspeakable photos being traded online, and background elements indicate she lives in Algonquin Bay. Delorme is desperate to find the girl before she suffers more abuse.
When Cardinal receives a string of hateful anonymous notes about his wife’s death, he begins to suspect homicide. His colleagues believe he is too distraught to think clearly, and he’s forced to investigate alone. In doing so, he comes up against a brand of killer neither he—nor the reader—has ever seen before.

Crime Machine (#5)
A year after the death of his beloved and troubled wife, Catherine, John Cardinal has moved into a new, but very humid, condo. He has fallen into an easy routine of work on cold case files and platonic movie nights with friend and colleague Lise Delorme. The quiet of a snow-covered Algonquin Bay is shattered when the decapitated bodies of two people are found in a summer home on Trout Lake. The victims, visitors from Russia, are in Algonquin Bay attending the annual fur auction. This is by no means a routine murder investigation as Cardinal soon discovers, but a horrific piece of a very twisted puzzle.