"Intensely vivid characters, terrible crimes and a brutal deep-frozen landscape… Giles Blunt is a really tremendous crime novelist." – Lee Child

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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.

Review

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
 
“As distinctively Canadian as a Tom Thomson painting. . . . Crime Machine is as good as Canadian crime fiction gets.” — Margaret Cannon, The Globe and Mail
 
“A marvelously controlled writer, equally confident with characters and narrative.”
— Toronto Star
 
“Teeming with questions, possibilities and clever, enticing dialogue.”
— The Hamilton Spectator

“With Crime Machine, Blunt delivers another twisting page-turner that will keep readers up late at night, proving yet again that he can deftly toe the line between terror and intrigue.”
— CBC Books

“First-rate series. . . .You can hear the crunch of snowshoes through the bush, smell the buckshot mingling with fresh blood.”
— NOW (Toronto)

“Another winner from one of Canada’s leading crime writers.” —The Peterborough Examiner

From the Hardcover edition.

Product Description

The long-awaited new instalment in the award-winning, bestselling John Cardinal mystery series.

A year after the death of his beloved and troubled wife, Catherine, John Cardinal has moved into a new, but very humid, condo. He has fallen into an easy routine of work on cold case files and platonic movie nights with friend and colleague Lise Delorme. The quiet of a snow-covered Algonquin Bay is shattered when the decapitated bodies of two people are found in a summer home on Trout Lake. The victims, visitors from Russia, are in Algonquin Bay attending the annual fur auction. This is by no means a routine murder investigation as Cardinal soon discovers, but a horrific piece of a very twisted puzzle. Blunt has, once again, given us a page-turning plot, a remarkable cast of characters and the comfort of John Cardinal at the helm.

From the Hardcover edition.

Alors qu'une tempête de neige d'une exceptionnelle violence menace la petite ville canadienne d'Algonquin Bay, un homme fait une effroyable découverte : un bras humain, apparemment déchiqueté par un ours, et enseveli sous un épais manteau neigeux. Immédiatement dépêché sur les lieux, l'inspecteur John Cardinal, accompagné de Lise Delorme, se lance dans une enquête qui ne tarde pas à dévoiler son lot de zones d'ombre. Première découverte, la victime, dont on a retrouvé d'autres morceaux de corps éparpillés dans la nature, n'est autre qu'un ex-agent de la CIA. Plus troublant encore, il semblerait que ce dernier ait joué un rôle actif au cours des événements d'octobre 1970, durant lesquels un obscur mouvement révolutionnaire, le Front de Libération du Québec, avait causé la mort d'un ministre local...

En Algonquin Bay, una pequeña ciudad canadiense, han desaparecido cuatro adolescentes sin dejar rastro. La policía abre una investigación, que pronto se revela infructuosa. El único que se resiste a abandonar el caso es el solitario y tenaz detective John Cardinal. Tendrá que darse prisa, porque quizá esté en juego la vida de otros inocentes.

Todo hace suponer que el macabro hallazgo de un cuerpo descuartizado en los bosques al norte de Algonquin Bay es obra de los osos. Pero las pesquisas llevan a los detectives Cardinal y Delorme a un remoto cobertizo de trampero, que el despiadado criminal ha utilizado como matadero. Y en la espesura del bosque, de pronto, aparece un segundo cadáver, desnudo y cubierto por una capa de hielo. Tras salvarse por los pelos de verse incriminado en una investigación sobre corrupción llevada a cabo -por la Real Policía Montada de Canadá, a John Cardinal no le hace ninguna gracia enterarse de que el primer cadáver pertenece a un ciudadano norteamericano y de que la Policía Montada participará en el caso. El principal problema, sin embargo, es el Servicio Secreto canadiense. ¿Su interferencia se debe a una cuestión jurisdiccional por su posible relación con un caso de terrorismo, o se trata de algo aún más siniestro? Hasta la naturaleza parece querer dificultar la tarea a los policías. La tormenta de hielo más severa de los últimos cien años azota el norte de Ontario. Los bosques congelados cobran una belleza deslumbrante y mortífera; sólo el estrépito de ramas y líneas de alta tensión congeladas al caer interrumpen el insólito silencio reinante. Con este tétrico telón de fondo, Cardinal deberá enfrentarse a un asesino.