Giles Blunt
Autor(a) de Forty Words for Sorrow
About the Author
Image credit: Janna Eggeheen
Séries
Obras de Giles Blunt
Cuarenta manera de decir dolor 1 exemplar(es)
Gefrorene Seelen 1 exemplar(es)
Kanadische Wälder: Der zweite Fall für John Cardinal (Ein Fall für John Cardinal) (2024) 1 exemplar(es)
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Nome padrão
- Blunt, Giles
- Data de nascimento
- 1952-02-02
- Sexo
- male
- Nacionalidade
- Canada
- Local de nascimento
- Windsor, Ontario, Canada
- Locais de residência
- North Bay, Ontario, Canada
New York, New York, USA
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Windsor, Ontario, Canada - Educação
- University of Toronto (English literature)
- Ocupação
- screenwriter
- Premiações
- Arthur Ellis Award (2004)
- Agente
- Helen Heller (Helen Heller Agency)
- Pequena biografia
- I grew up in North Bay, Ontario, a child of parents so English that the space on their passports for citizenship could only be filled in: British Beyond Belief. They had colorful accents and amusing habits and never allowed themselves to be influenced by Canadians. Consequently I lived in England at home and Canada at school.
Things were further confused by my growing up Catholic. British people aren't supposed to be Catholic, but I attended a Catholic boys' school called Scollard Hall where I was subject to the usual bullying and injustice. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. Eventually, I negotiated a deal with my parents that got me into a regular school for grades twelve and thirteen. Algonquin Composite had actual girls in it and consequently my attendance improved.
The result of this peculiar background was that I never felt truly Canadian; I always felt like a visitor. Then, in 1980, I moved to New York City where I lived for the next 22 years. Americans treat Canadians in their midst with a sort of amused condescension that's quite touching. You know: "They come down here, they take our women..."
Living in New York gave me enough distance from northern Ontario to see it through a very long lens. I now visit North Bay and it seems exotic. It is exotic. It's ridiculous that anybody should live there, really, in the land of ice and snow. I mean, what kind of person comes to a hunk of rock surrounded by ice and pine trees and figures it's a good bet to settle down there? Okay, fur traders. But as soon as they have enough money fur traders head for Florida just like everyone else.
Membros
Resenhas
(2001)Pretty good police proc. located in the winter in Ontario. Kids are disappearing and one is found frozen in the ice of nearby lake. Small town police force tries to investigate while avoiding the heavy handed approach of the RCMP. Also one of the detectives is believed to be taking bribes or stealing and this complicates the investigation. (Amazon.com) It gets dark early in Algonquin Bay. Take a drive up Airport Hill at four o' clock on a February afternoon, and when you come back half an hour later the streets of the city will glitter below you in the dark like so many runways. The forty-sixth parallel may not be all that far north; you can be much farther north and still be in the United States, and even London, England, is a few degrees closer to the North Pole. But this is Ontario, Canada, we're talking about, and Algonquin Bay in February is the very definition of winter. Algonquin Bay is snowbound, Algonquin Bay is quiet, Algonquin Bay is very, very cold.Read the evocative opening of Giles Blunt's novel and you may begin to understand why Tony Hillerman says this is the novel he wishes he'd written. Keep reading, and you may wonder why other authors haven't joined the vicarious narrative line. With devastating precision, Blunt effortlessly weaves together strands of lives both led and taken in this tiny Canadian town, limning a hauntingly paradoxical picture of isolation and community, two sides of a fragile bulwark against violence.John Cardinal was taken off homicide investigation after a fruitless and expensive quest for 13-year-old Katie Pine, a Chippewa girl who disappeared from the nearby reservation. After months of insisting that Katie was no runaway, Cardinal receives the cold comfort of vindication in the form of Katie's corpse, discovered in an abandoned mine shaft. But the case, when reopened, becomes a Pandora's box of horror. Katie's body is only the first to be found, as Cardinal uncovers a pattern that links her death to those of two other children. When another boy is reported missing, Cardinal knows he is in a race against time to find the killer (so trite a phrase, while technically accurate, does radical injustice to Blunt's razor-sharp plot and eerily pragmatic balance between the cop and his prey).His new partner, Lise Delorme, is trying to uncover her own pattern. Drafted by the RCMP to find proof that Cardinal has been accepting money from drug runner Kyle Corbett to derail the Mounties' investigations (three attempted busts good for absolutely nothing), she sifts through the minutiae of Cardinal's life. Proud father, loving husband, dedicated officer--at what price has this edifice been constructed? Suffice it to say that Cardinal's past and present link him in ironic counterpoint to those people for whom he is inevitably the bearer of bad tidings, leaving them "trying to recognize each other through the smoke and ashes" of grief.Blunt has created a world in which every conversation can seem as ominous as the moan of the wind and the bullet-like report of shifting lake ice ("It was a new art form for Delorme, picking shards of fact from the exposed hearts of the bereaved. She looked at Cardinal for help, but he said nothing. He thought, "Get used to it."). But it is also a world whose bleak landscape is touched with unexpected humor. Witness this description of one of the many minor, but always beautifully detailed, characters who populate the novel's pages: "Arthur 'Woody' Wood was not in the burglary business to enhance his social life. Like all professional burglars, he went to great lengths to avoid meeting people on the job. At other times, well, Woody was as sociable as the next fellow."Part police procedural, part psychological thriller, part exploration of a region's landscape and people, the novel is an astonishing, powerful hybrid-- worthy of far more than a mere 40 words of praise.… (mais)
Wow!
Gasping for breath as I galloped to the finish...a thrilling read, dark and twisted and based in interesting research.
Wonderful tale with a merging of past wrongs and present ones, woven into each other with an overwhelming feeling of cold. The locations are Arctic and Northern Ontario, but even considering that, Blunt managed to make me feel cold even on a bright fall day. He invests every page with a chill, psychological or physical. I love it when a writer can put me so in situ that I actually feel the weather.
Blunt writes dark mysteries. There hasn't been a one that I've read hat hasn't made me check the door locks when I go to bed at night. That said, some reviewers below seem surprised about the sex in this novel, the depravities, etc.
For me, they were secondary, but added a depth to Delorme's character - a background that is based on more than her affection for Cardinal. I am intrigued, a bit repelled, and eagerly awaiting developments. Cardinal has the shadow of his wife; she needs shadows for balance and as a woman in my 50's, I know that there are parts of my personality that I am only identifying now as I pick away at the stories I've told myself for years. Some aren't that great. I have some apologizing to do. So it doesn't seem a stretch for me that Delorme finds things in herself that she didn't recognize before. It makes her more interesting as a character.
I am a bit tired of the dropped in big mouth incompetent cop meme - it's everywhere as no doubt they truly are. Bureaucracies. But it's getting tired and I'd like to see a more creative twist.
Non-mainstream sexuality figures in the novel, so if this bothers you, you may wish to avoid. For me, I was too tied up in the story to really notice it.
… (mais)
Gasping for breath as I galloped to the finish...a thrilling read, dark and twisted and based in interesting research.
Wonderful tale with a merging of past wrongs and present ones, woven into each other with an overwhelming feeling of cold. The locations are Arctic and Northern Ontario, but even considering that, Blunt managed to make me feel cold even on a bright fall day. He invests every page with a chill, psychological or physical. I love it when a writer can put me so in situ that I actually feel the weather.
Blunt writes dark mysteries. There hasn't been a one that I've read hat hasn't made me check the door locks when I go to bed at night. That said, some reviewers below seem surprised about the sex in this novel, the depravities, etc.
For me, they were secondary, but added a depth to Delorme's character - a background that is based on more than her affection for Cardinal. I am intrigued, a bit repelled, and eagerly awaiting developments. Cardinal has the shadow of his wife; she needs shadows for balance and as a woman in my 50's, I know that there are parts of my personality that I am only identifying now as I pick away at the stories I've told myself for years. Some aren't that great. I have some apologizing to do. So it doesn't seem a stretch for me that Delorme finds things in herself that she didn't recognize before. It makes her more interesting as a character.
I am a bit tired of the dropped in big mouth incompetent cop meme - it's everywhere as no doubt they truly are. Bureaucracies. But it's getting tired and I'd like to see a more creative twist.
Non-mainstream sexuality figures in the novel, so if this bothers you, you may wish to avoid. For me, I was too tied up in the story to really notice it.
… (mais)
I saw the first series of Cardinal, the TV adaptation of Forty Words For Sorrow, a few years ago and enjoyed the way it created an atmosphere of distrust and threat that was partly embodied by the fierce cold weather in which most of the action took place.
It turns out that the TV version was fairly faithful to the book but there were, inevitably, simplifications so there was enough about the book that was different to keep it feeling fresh.
Both of the main detectives, John Cardinal and Lise Delorme, are well-drawn. They come across as believably human and they are quite different from one another: age, gender and ethnic background. I liked how their relationship developed from a starting point of (well-deserved) mutual suspicion to something that might become a partnership, albeit a partnership between two naturally solitary people.
There was a focus on mental health in the book that felt a little off-kilter. The killers are depicted as psychotic. Cardinal's wife is bipolar. Cardinal himself verges on paranoid (although people really are out to get him) and Delorme has an exceptionally low now for association which, if it's not pathological, certainly puts her in a mental minority. None of this was badly done but it did feel a little as if poor mental health was the main cause of sorrow in this book. In my experience, it's more often the other way around.
The atmosphere of the novel was dolorous but not hopeless. The bleak winter weather and the mostly rural landscape are almost characters in their own right.
The plot was twisty and there are a couple of side plots to make things interesting. I'll be back for the rest of the series.… (mais)
It turns out that the TV version was fairly faithful to the book but there were, inevitably, simplifications so there was enough about the book that was different to keep it feeling fresh.
Both of the main detectives, John Cardinal and Lise Delorme, are well-drawn. They come across as believably human and they are quite different from one another: age, gender and ethnic background. I liked how their relationship developed from a starting point of (well-deserved) mutual suspicion to something that might become a partnership, albeit a partnership between two naturally solitary people.
There was a focus on mental health in the book that felt a little off-kilter. The killers are depicted as psychotic. Cardinal's wife is bipolar. Cardinal himself verges on paranoid (although people really are out to get him) and Delorme has an exceptionally low now for association which, if it's not pathological, certainly puts her in a mental minority. None of this was badly done but it did feel a little as if poor mental health was the main cause of sorrow in this book. In my experience, it's more often the other way around.
The atmosphere of the novel was dolorous but not hopeless. The bleak winter weather and the mostly rural landscape are almost characters in their own right.
The plot was twisty and there are a couple of side plots to make things interesting. I'll be back for the rest of the series.… (mais)
Listas
Global Mysteries (2)
Five star books (1)
Prêmios
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Estatísticas
- Obras
- 18
- Membros
- 3,100
- Popularidade
- #8,239
- Avaliação
- 3.7
- Resenhas
- 193
- ISBNs
- 195
- Idiomas
- 9
- Favorito
- 14
The call comes for John Cardinal when a local living near the woods reports a gruesome discovery. His dog has retrieved a severed human arm. The investigators retrieve more parts traced back to a cabin where the body was hacked apart to be eaten by bears. It’s an American scouting out ice fishing possibilities. The Mounties, are called in, including a former nemesis of Cardinal’s.
Meanwhile, Cardinal’s father’s heart condition is worsening. The one bright spot is a young woman doctor, Winter Cates, recently arrived and quickly embraced for her ability to connect with patients, including Cardinal’s father. Then she goes missing. Soon her naked body is found in the woods. That case goes to DeLorme, but they soon begin to wonder if the murders are connected. They wonder more when they discover a fifteen year old case of a woman murdered under similar circumstances, strangled with signs that made it look like she had been raped.
The only evidence they have is that Cates’ murderer apparently sought her out to treat a gunshot wound, leaving signs of type AB blood in her office, but nothing else. Then Cardinal goes to New York where the first murder victim lived to learn that the supposed victim is very much alive and that the real victim is a former CIA agent using his identity. But what was he doing in Canada? And why are Canadian Security Intelligence Services making it hard to track down the story behind this man?
While this is all going on, Cardinal is getting veiled death threats from a criminal he put away, due to be released from prison soon. They are coming to his home. A buried secret connected to the case is putting his family in jeopardy.
Further clues from the case of the murdered CIA agent lead to Montreal and a terrorist plot that resulted in the death of a hostage in the 1970’s and a mysterious figure, Yves Grenelle, who disappeared after the death. Could Grenelle be the killer who has left three bodies in the forests of Algonquin Bay, perhaps under another identity? Who is he and why Algonquin Bay?
An artist skilled in taking images and “aging” them gives DeLorme and Cardinal a clue to the identity of the killer, but there is not enough evidence to make an arrest, let alone convict, leading Cardinal to make a risky move to confront the suspected murderer amid a hundred year ice storm.
DeLorme and Cardinal work well while respecting boundaries. But they clearly notice each other–she appreciating Cardinal’s maturity and integrity, he noticing her attractiveness. Then they are thrown together, sharing a hotel room but in separate beds, when DeLorme’s room is flooded and none are available. Nothing happens, except in Cardinal’s mind, as he struggled to sleep. It’s awkward, and we’re left wondering how the two will work it out. At least Cardinal doesn’t keep it secret from his wife.
The book is one you don’t want to put down. There are threads left dangling for future books in the series. And having lived through ice storms with power outages, and frigid weather, Blunt captures the creeping dread one has in these kind of storms and the deeper frustration and ominous foreboding when one knows who a killer is but cannot find the way to prove it.… (mais)