Tangled Web UK Review May 2007
The Delicate Storm by
Giles Blunt
pbk out May 07
(HarperCollins)
at £6.99
It's Canada, and Northern Ontario is shortly to be in the grip of a terrible ice
storm. But at the moment the weather is unseasonably warm, and it's just Detective
John Cardinal's life that is stormy. Cardinal is the image of an upright police officer,
but he has a murky secret from his past concerning money found during a drugs raid.
Now the offender convicted as a result of the raid is due out of prison, and he knows
where Cardinal lives. Cardinal also has a wife of delicate health not long out of
psychiatric hospital, and a father whose heart is failing him. Everything's pretty
normal for a fictional cop's life, then.
While all these worries are on his mind, he is called to an armed robbery
perpetrated by a known villain jokingly called Wudky, from the initials WDC. This
stands for Worlds Dumbest Criminal. And this time he is apprehended because he
wrote the holdup note on the back of his own arrest warrant. But this time Wudky is
useful - he knows of a murder boasted of by trapper, Thierry Ferand. (Well, there's
got to be a trapper in a Canadian story, hasn't there?) The trouble is the supposed
dead man, Paul Bressard, is still alive. However, there is a body. Only it's in bits,
having been gnawed by bears. (Well you've got to have bears in a Canadian story,
haven't you?)
Cardinal, and his buddy, attractive French Canadian Lise Delorme, trace the
remains to a missing American, Howard Matlock. At this point, Cardinal gets
entangled in the sort of jurisdictional mess that can only take place in Canada. Or
America. So many law enforcement agencies, you're not surprised they are all falling
over each other all the time. Cardinal is attacked, but is it the Canadian Secret
Service, or is it...wait for it...the Mounties? (Well, in a Canadian story...etc)
Seriously though, the twists and turns of this story are endlessly gripping. We
move from possible spies, a Secret Service cover-up, through a second puzzling
murder of a local doctor, to the CIA and the recent past. By then, Cardinal is digging
in the 1960s, and unearthing the dirty affair of a failed kidnapping and murder by
members of the FLQ. The Front de Libération de Québec was a hotbed of
revolutionaries, and infiltrated by agents. But who wants to keep his murky past
secret now? The story line is complicated but never incomprehensible, or tedious, and
Blunt leads us a headlong chase through the convolutions, and into shattering
examinations of people's hearts and motives. Not least those of his main character,
John Cardinal himself. The ending is tough for John to take, but the journey for the
reader is well worth the effort.
(
Ian Morson
Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger)
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