Giles Blunt

A John Cardinal Mysterythere is nothing more still than a dead body, and no mistaking it for anything else. This one was naked, covered with a glaze of ice. Even the long black hair that fell in tendrils across her face was encased in ice. It was as if she were under a spellthe victim of a jealous wizard, a wicked witch. [The Delicate Storm, page...

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...

Red Bear stood close to the fire and stretched toward the sky, every muscle in his body straining. The veins in his neck stood out like electrical cords. His voice had gone thin and raspy and the words came streaming out of him with a terrible urgency. The words if in fact they were words collided with one another. [Blackfly Season, page...

A master crime writer trains every weapon in his arsenal on a crime against humanity.A literary novel that treads fearlessly into one of recent historys most shocking moral crucibles.In 1980s El Salvador, a young woman is detained in a government torture squads head-quarters, suspected of supporting guerilla forces. There, a bookish new recruit,...

Forty Words for Sorrow, The Delicate Storm, Blackfly SeasonWhen we first meet Detective John Cardinal in Forty Words for Sorrow he is 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, and his refusal to give up on four...

The Planet Grief. An incalculable number of light years from the warmth of the sun. When the rain falls, it falls in droplets of grief, and when the light shines, it is in waves and particles of grief. From whatever direction the wind blowssouth, east, north or west it blows cinders of grief before it. Grief stings your eyes and sucks the breath...