Forty Words for Sorrow

A riveting portrayal of two monstrous sociopaths and the cops who track them, Forty Words for Sorrow is tense and terrifying as it crosscuts between the cops in pursuit and the killers toying with their latest victim.

"Blunt has done for Canada's north what James Lee Burke did for Cajun Louisiana."
-Margaret Cannon, Toronto Globe and MailWhen the badly decomposed body of thirteen-year-old Katie Pine is found in an abandoned mine shaft, John Cardinal is vindicated. It was Cardinal who'd kept the Pine case open-insisting she was no mere runaway-and Cardinal who'd been demoted to the burglary squad for his excessive zeal. But Katie Pine isn't the only youngster to have gone missing in the rural town of Algonquin Bay, and Cardinal is now given the go-ahead to reopen the files on three other lost kids. When another youth is reported missing, he begins to see a pattern that screams "serial killer."

Meanwhile, the brass have partnered him with Lisa Delorme, newly shifted to homicide from the Office of Special Investigations, and Cardinal can't help but wonder if she's been sent to keep tabs on him. A guilty conscience makes him think so.

Superbly paced, with fully fleshed characters and utterly convincing police detail, Forty Words for Sorrow is also a novel of place that transcends genre. Blunt puts us in a small Canadian town in the dead of winter and makes us feel the cold, then turns the cold into a metaphor for the destruction of young lives.

A riveting portrait of two monstrous sociopaths and the cops who track them, "Forty Words for Sorrow" is tense and terrifying as it crosscuts between the cops in pursuit and the killers toying with their latest victim.