Forty Words for Sorrow (John Cardinal and Lise DeLorme Mystery #1), Giles Blunt. New York: Berkley Books, 2000.

Summary: When a missing teenager’s body is found in a mineshaft, John Cardinal is re-assigned to a case he’d been pulled off of and is joined by Lise DeLorme, who is also investigating him for corruption. Meanwhile, facts point to a serial killer when another body turns up and another missing youth is traced to their community.

John Cardinal had been investigating the disappearance of a girl, Katie Pine, that he’d linked to another missing youth. When the search threatened to absorb most of the Algonquin Bay police department resources, he was taken off the case. No other leads developed until now. Then a body was found, frozen in ice in an abandoned mine shaft. and identified as Katie Pine. He is put back on the case. We learn the depths of how much Cardinal cares about his work, and about the victims of crime in this interior monologue after he tells Katie’s widowed mother that her body has been found:

“Eskimos, 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 for this childless mother in her empty house.”

Blunt, p. 37

Cardinal has been assigned a partner from Special Investigations, Lise DeLorme. Sharp, observant, and strikingly attractive, it turns out she is investigating Cardinal on the quiet. After several frustrated attempts to bust a major credit card fraud operation, it becomes apparent someone is tipping off the suspect, a man by the name of Corbett. Cardinal suspects the investigation though DeLorme denies it. And there is something suspicious about this apparently diligent, caring cop. His wife is in an expensive psychiatric facility and he has a daughter in an art program at Yale. And all this on a cop’s salary. Yet as DeLorme comes to work with him, it seems out of character.

Their investigation leads them to see a link with one and possibly two other missing youth. They find another body. Then the girlfriend of another young man shows up. He had been headed to Algonquin Bay and had failed to stay in touch. It looks like they are hunting for a serial killer. Will they find the killer before there is another victim? They may have some time, but not a lot–it appears that the killer likes to play with the victims before administering slow, torturous deaths.

Unbeknownst to Cardinal and DeLorme, they are looking for two people, a twisted young man who already has a record as a child for killing animals and a needy, unattractive young woman who has been taken in thrall with both the man and his cult-like fascination with torture and murder. As DeLorme and Cardinal investigate, tension rachets up as we follow the killers in their plans to “party” with Keith London, the missing young man. The plot moves back and forth between the killers and the detectives, with the investigation DeLorme is pursuing on Cardinal in the background and Cardinal’s own troubled conscience raising further apprehensions.

Blunt plots this masterfully, developing the relationship between Cardinal and DeLorme from initial distrust to growing admiration that stays professional. Cardinal is faithful to his wife–even when she thinks herself worthless in her illness. We find ourselves rooting for them, not only to catch the killer(s), but for Cardinal to be cleared and for them to be able to trust each other. Blunt combines a fascinating police procedural with characters we care about and a psycho-thriller with truly evil killers and a young man with a girlfriend who loves him who we desperately want to survive.

[BTW, thanks BT for the gift of a great read!]