When four teenagers go missing in the small northern town of Algonquin Bay, the extensive police investigation comes up empty. Everyone is ready to give up except Detective John Cardinal, an all-too-human loner whose persistence only serves to get him removed from homicide. Haunted by a criminal secret in his own past and hounded by a special investigation into corruption on the force (conducted, he suspects, by his own partner), Cardinal is on the brink of losing his career - and his family. Then the mutilated body of thirteen-year-old Katie Pine is pulled out of an abandoned mineshaft. And only Cardinal is willing to consider the horrible truth: that this quiet town is home to the most vicious of killers. With the media, the provincial police and his own department questioning his every move, Cardinal follows increasingly tenuous threads towards the unthinkable. Time isn't only running out for him, but for another young victim, tied up in a basement wondering when and how his captors will kill him. Evoking the Canadian winter and the hearts of the killers and cops in icily realistic prose, Giles Blunt has produced a masterful crime novel that rivals the best of Martin Cruz Smith and introduces readers to a detective hero whose own human faults serve to fuel his unerring sense of justice.

Prizes

Winner of Macallan Gold Dagger for Fiction 2001,Winner of Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger Award 2001

'This is the book I've been waiting for through twenty years of reviewing crime fiction. This is the first great Canadian crime novel. Giles Blunt has done for Canada's north what James Lee Burke did for Cajun Louisiana. With Forty Words for Sorrow, the Canadian crime novel finally comes of age' Margaret Cannon, Globe

Giles Blunt grew up in North Bay, Ontario, and now lives in New York City. He's written scripts for Law & Order, Street Legal and Night Heat. He is at work on his next crime novel, The Glittering Wood, also set in the fictional town of Algonquin Bay, and featuring John Cardinal.