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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. A shake of the dark head, a shudder in the shoulders. Another tiny splash on the linoleum floor. Husband murdered, and now her daughter too. The Inuit, it is said, have forty different words for snow. Never mind about snow, Cardinal mused, what people really need is forty words for sorrow. Grief. Heartbreak. Desolation. There were not enough, not for this childless mother in her empty house. [Forty Words for Sorrow, page 42] The mutilated body of a young girl has been discovered in an abandoned mine shaft on the desolate Lake Nipissing island of Windigo. Missing since September, Katie Pine has finally been found, encased in a block of ice as if preserved in amber. The intense police investigation when she first disappeared had gone nowhere, and Detective John Cardinal went from solving murders to investigating burglaries and petty crimes. But now all bets are off. Cardinal is back on the case; this time with a new partner. Lise Delorme, a sexy and passionate former internal investigator, makes Cardinal uneasy. With a guilty conscience to fuel his suspicion, Cardinal wonders if Delorme isn't there to investigate him. And his suspicions are well founded. Delmore has made a deal with the devil: in order to leave SIU for good, she must gain Cardinal's trust and then betray it. There are allegations of corruption on the force, and Cardinal's "extracurricular" activities during a counterfeiting investigation are being called into question. Delorme is convinced that Cardinal is innocent of any wrongdoing and even when her investigation calls his integrity into question, she is reluctant to believe it. When Cardinal makes the gruesome discovery of the bodies of two more missing teenagers, he doesn't spend time worrying about his suspicions concerning Delorme. His focus is on a more sinister concern-a serial killer hiding somewhere in this quiet northern town. That concern becomes laced with urgency when Karen Steen, a young woman from Guelph, arrives to speak to Cardinal about her missing boyfriend, Keith London. Cardinal begins to believe that Keith is the fourth young person to disappear in Algonquin Bay. But unlike the other victims, he believes that Keith may still be alive. The question now becomes, what is the connection between the three dead and one missing teenager' Can Cardinal and Delorme find Keith London before it's too late' From the Hardcover edition Now a major television series, CARDINAL , and the first book in the John Cardinal series. 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, 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 serial killers. The case as it unfolds proves eerily reminiscent of the Moors murders in Britain, as an unassuming young man and his belligerently loyal girlfriend scout young victims for their macabre games. 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.