The delicate storm - Giles Blunt

Stylish, atmospheric psychological police thriller featuring detectives Cardinal and Delorme

'It lay there, fishbelly white, hair curling along one side. Toward the wrist end, the flesh still bore the zigzag impression of a watch with an expandable bracelet. Even though there was no hand attached, there was no doubt that the thing lying in Ivan Bergeron's backyard was a human arm.'

The gruesome discovery in the wilderness above Algonquin Bay is assumed to be the work of bears. Until the search for body parts leads detectives Cardinal and Delorme to a remote trapper's cabin that has served as an abbattoir for a cold-blooded human predator. Until the woods give up a second body, naked and shrouded in ice.

Having narrowly survived an RCMP investigation into police corruption, John Cardinal is less than thrilled when the first victim is identified as a US citizen and the Mounties are called in to assist. It's the Canadian Secret Service, however, that pose the real problem. Is their interference in the case merely a question of preserving jurisdiction over cases involving terrorism - or something more sinister?

Even the elements seem to be conspiring against the police, with Northern Ontario in the grip of an ice storm of once-in-a-hundred-years severity. The woods take on a glittering, lethal beauty, the eerie silence broken only by the crash of falling branches and power lines. And against this backdrop Cardinal comes face to face with a killer.

Second in the series featuring John Cardinal and Lise Delorme, central characters in the widely acclaimed Forty Words for Sorrow.