Cardinal: Forty Words for Sorrow (TV Tie-in Edition)

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 further 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.

John Cardinal was driving home from the airport where he had just watched his daughter, Kelly, board a plane bound for the United States by way of Toronto. The car still smelled of her or at least of the scent that had lately become her trademark: Rhapsody or Ecstasy or some such. To Cardinal, wife gone and now daughter gone, it smelled of loneliness.

It was many degrees below zero outside; winter squeezed the car in its grip. The windows of the Camry were frosted up on both sides, and Cardinal had to keep scraping them with an ineffective plastic blade. He went south down Airport Hill, made a left onto the bypass, another left onto Trout Lake Road, and then he was heading north again toward home.

Home, if you could call it that with both Catherine and Kelly gone, was a tiny wooden house on Madonna Road, smallest among a crescent of cottages set like a brooch along the north shore of Trout Lake. Cardinal s house was fully winterized, or so the real estate agent had told them, but winterized had turned out to be a relative term. Kelly claimed you could store ice cream in her bedroom.

His drive was hidden by four-foot-high snowbanks, so Cardinal didn t see the car blocking his way until he almost rear-ended it. It was one of the unmarkeds from work, great pale clouds of exhaust blasting out from behind. Cardinal reversed and parked across the

GILES BLUNT grew up in North Bay, Ontario, and spent twenty years in New York City as a novelist and a scriptwriter for such shows as Law and Order, Street Legal and Night Heat, before making his home in Toronto. He is the author of the  bestselling Cardinal crime series, featuring Algonquin Bay's John Cardinal and Lise Delorme, which has been made into a TV series for CTV. He is widely considered "one of Canada's top crime novelists" (The Globe and Mail) and among "crime drama's elite" (Publishers Weekly). He is a two-time winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel and a recipient of the British Crime Writers' Macallan Silver Dagger.

Winner of the Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction

"The highest praise a writer can give another is to say he wishes he had written this book. I wish I had written Forty Words for Sorrow. Giles Blunt has a tremendous talent. If you miss Forty Words for Sorrow, you'll miss one of best novels of 2001." Tony Hillerman, author of The Dark Wind

"Forty Words for Sorrow is brilliant 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 has it all unforgettable characters, beautiful language, throat-constricting suspense." Jonathan Kellerman, author of When the Bough Breaks

"Forty Words for Sorrow is a smart, superbly written novel which tests a likeable, fallible pair of investigators with some intriguing ethical questions as they use their considerable skills to solve a set of monstrous and disturbing crimes." Thomas Perry, author of The Butcher s Boy

"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, author of the Jack Reacher novels

"Forty Words for Sorrow satisfies right down to the marrow." Quill and Quire

"Blunt's complex plot has history and a lot of nuance. His characters, particularly Cardinal, have the depth and resonance readers demand. . . . Don't read it just because it's a good crime novel and because once you've begun, you won't put it down until you're finished. Read it because it's excellent." The Globe and Mail

"This highly readable combination of mystery and suspense (with a sequel already in the works) raises the bar of Canadian crime writing and is a dead certain nomination for multiple writing awards." National Post

"The clues unfold in convincing ways, with no impossible surprises, no flukey bits of luck to defy belief. . . . The final