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

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.

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.