Customer Reviews

Black Fly Season

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Black Fly Season" was my first Giles Blunt novel and, after reading it, I'm surprised Blunt is not a runaway best seller. "Black Fly" has all the right stuff of a perfect mystery/thriller: interesting characters, a well-tuned plot, crisp dialogue, and an unlikely but effective northern Canadian setting. Blunt's writing style is similar to Lee Child - high praise - while the content is reminiscent of Ken Goddard, who has written some fine crime novels ("Balefire", "Prey"...) featuring the US Fish and Wildlife Department. Giles and researched his subject material well, and throws in some neat forensics to boot, making for the classic summer read that will keep you up long after you should be sleeping.

A young girl his wandering around the local Algonquin Bay watering hole, incoherent and obviously suffering from amnesia. With good reason, it turns out - she has a bullet lodged in her brain. Homicide detective John Cardinal and his partner Lise Delorme are on the case, trying first to identify the redheaded young victim and then try and find those behind the attempted murder. From there, Blunt takes us on a guided tour of the north woods heroin trade, complete with renegade bikers and a mysterious and evil Voodoo-like religion. Blunt keep the story line clean and the dialog mercifully crisp, focusing his efforts on unraveling the crime while building a uniquely depraved bad guy. The thriller clips along to a suspenseful if predictable climax and high adrenaline entertainment for the whole trip. This is highly recommended reading; I'm looking forward to catching up on Blunt's previous efforts that I've missed.

This was the first time I'd read a book by this Canadian author, and I was very impressed with Mr. Blunt's writing and plotting skills. We have two very likeable police partners in this series - John Cardinal and Lise Delorme. The book is set in Algonquin Bay, Ontario, Canada (250 miles north of Toronto). John and Lise have a different type of mystery to solve. A young woman is discovered walking around acting strange, and she doesn't remember who she was. It is discovered that she has a small-calibre bullet in her brain. Then bodies start turning up. One is particularly gruesome. The body of a biker from a local gang is found minus his head, hands and feet. Mr. Blunt gives us a good insight into forensic entomology as Lise and John try to solve what appears to be ritualistic killings. They are up against a particularly odious killer in this one. This appears to be a great series, and I intend to read the previous two books in this series soon.

Mr. Blunt creates one of the finest mystery novels I have ever read with this book. He has multiple characteristics embedded in his writing that make him one of the very best mystery writers ever. His articulation is excellent. His vocabulary is a few levels up from the usual 8th grade vocabulary used, even by many of the masters. And, perhaps the most interesting technique of all is the "architecture" of the book. The use of small and fast reading chapters; the elegance and depth of character development; the complexity of the crimes and the intricacy of finding the one who was responsible; all combine to make this book a very fine work of Murder/Mystery Authorship.

The book is very much centered around the use of Santeria, a Cuban form of Voodoo, but with particularly nasty methods. This version of voodoo believes that one can kill animals, and even human beings and make their spirits do work for you; gather information for you; etc. But in order to make those spirits do their work for you, the sacrifice must be done in the right phase of the moon, and the victim must be horribly tortured to death, while mutilated so that all blood runs out of the body. This is the scene that Officer Cardinal and his partner Officer Delorme are dealing with in this story.

The detail, at just the right level is particularly well developed by Blunt in this story. He has a knack of being able to write about a horrifying crime scene just to the right limit, where only the characters actually get nauseous; but not quite the reader. His ability to describe the relevant details of a scene is glorious and his sentences are not over-modified with excessive adjectives and adverbs to create the illusion of literary style. Blunt actually has literary style, which is one of the things that make this book so attractive and interesting to read.

The climax is very much climactic. And the development of the story, especially from the reader's perspective is superb. This book is very highly recommended for all readers of the Murder/Mystery Genre, and for any reader looking for a page turning experience that is on the edge of actual classic literature.

This novel, the third in the Cardinal/Delorme series continues the action in a small Canadian town with the two dedicated detectives hot on the trail of a vicious and elusive killer. The novel moves along quite well with the reader constantly wondering if the police can outdo the bad guy. Delorme and Cardinal are a great pair of characters and the author really plays them off each other very convincingly. Cardinal seems to be more fleshed out in this story. We learn more about his distrubed wife and other demons he has to deal with. I would like to see more about the Delorme character in the next novel which can't come too soon. This is a really good series.

Near Algonquin Bay, Canada, the patrons are enjoying their drinks at World Tavern when the woman entered. Black fly bites were all over her body and she flitters from one table to the next. When locals try to pick her up starting with asking her name, she says she has no idea. They call her "Red" for obvious reasons. However, another patron local cop Jerry Commando takes the baffled woman to City Hospital.

Doctors quickly realize the cause of her perplexity and amnesia has nothing to do with frying her brain on drugs; instead the docile woman was shot in the head as there is a bullet lodged in her brain; she does not remember the incident. Homicide Detectives John Cardinal and Lise Delorme head the investigation that includes keeping Red safe because both law enforcement officials believes that the person who injured her shot to kill and once he or she learns she still lives will be back to correct their mistake.

The return of Cardinal and Delorme (see THE DELICATE STORM AND FORTY WORDS FOR SORROW) bluntly means a great time for police procedural fans. Their latest entry is as terrific as usual starting from the moment Red enters the remote local's bar, through a medical procedure to remove the bullet, and continuing as the two detectives know that she is a target, but to insure her safety may have to use her as bait. The motive for the attempted killing will chill the audience much more than winter in Ontario as it is based on real cult murders on the Mexican-United States border. BLACK FLY SEASON is a complex chiller that will shake the audience with its art imitates life premise.

Harriet Klausner

I have read all three books in this series and they just keep getting better and better. Blunt has created interesting, realistic characters in Cardinal and Delorme. His descriptions are wonderfully written without being overwhelming in detail.

The story flowed very well. This is not a "who done it" type of mystery. The story revolves more around who the characters are, why they do what they do, and how the mystery is solved. I would love to see this series of books get the attention they deserve.

I enjoyed this novel. This is my 2nd Giles Blunt novel, the first being Delicate Storm. I liked this one better. For one thing, it seemed somewhat more plausible. It was certainly gripping. There were enough strange but plausible twists, oddball characters, and unexpected developments to keep me going, wondering what would happen next.

There are several specific things I like about this, or perhaps Blunt's writing in general. First, and perhaps most important for me, is the sense of place. The locations, the dialogue, and the characters, all come across as very authentic. Even some of the screwier characters that appear in passing are sketched very nicely. Blunt is to northern Ontario as Mankell is to the Skane region in Sweden.

The characters, the action, and the dialogue generally seem very natural. As the plot unfolds, at each step the characters' actions and dialogue seem reasonable given the context. Things go right or wrong, people react, and move on. Even in the face of very complex or unpleasant situations, the characters seem low-key and their reactions fairly professional. I contrast this approach to writing with that in some other contemporary mystery series, where it seems like everything the lead characters do or say has to be over-the-top in order to sustain the reader's interest.

As some of the other reviews mentioned, there is a side-plot involving the medical condition of Cardinal's wife. Normally this sort of thing really turns me off. I really dislike mysteries that spend more time talking about the main characters' issues, whether alcoholism, illness, or a relationship, than they do about the main plot. I am thinking in particular here of some of the Rebus novels, which in a few cases became more about Rebus and his personal demons than about solving a mystery. Fortunately, Blunt keeps the elements involving the wife's condition in check, and the related passages are brief enough that they are not an annoying and melodramatic distraction in the way that such digressions often are.

I bought this book based upon the review of Gary Griffiths who has a spotlight review on this book here. I think we are not supposed to refer to other reviews here, and I am not going to do so. I am going to refer to the reviewer though because I think he does a fine job and I admire his reiews a lot. Gary writes honest, insightful reviews and if he thinks a book is great then there is a fair-to-middlin' chance I am going to think it is great too. We don't always agree though and this book is one of those instances.

I thought this was a good book but not a great book. All the pieces were there. Interesting, sympathetic characters, with interesting human-scale problems of their own, a puzzling crime, interesting forensics, clever/weird bad guys, and a great setting that is unusual: the north of Canada. Somehow though, somehow....when I finished this book my honest summation is that this is good, really good actually, but it doesn't quite reach that memorable plateau which defines a novel as "great". Perhaps I should have started at the beginning of the series and worked forward for a better appreciation of the characters and their devleopment because as it stands I don't think this book and the characters will be that memorable to me. If I was going to make a recommendation for a "northern" mystery series I would recommend the Alex McKnight series by Steve Hamilton first. In my mind that is a truly great series.

So my opinion is this is a solid, good mystery that won't disappoint you at all. You'll enjoy reading it and won't regret the investment of time and money. Yet for a truly great series of reads, in a similar setting and environment, check out the McKnight series by Hamilton. It's first-class, memorable stuff that is wonderful enough to make you anxiously await the annual next installment year after year.

This is a very enjoyable book, as good as "The Delicate Storm" and better than "Forty Words For Sorrow," which I found too disturbing and too derivative of a few sensational Canadian murders several years ago (one of the culprits of which was released from prison last summer).
John Cardinal is a great, realistic character, and the Ontario setting is a fascinating one. Algonquin Bay is really North Bay, Ontario; I have spent parts of the last 31 summers not far from North Bay and know the town, so for me the setting is particularly important.
Blunt should be a best seller.

I really enjoyed FORTY WORDS FOR SORROW, my first exposure to Giles Blunt, and have looked forward to his subsequent work. However, this novel more closely resembles Delicate Storm the Forty Words. Moments of pleasure, pages of boredom, this novel is an uneven disappointment for readers of Forty Words. Where John Cardinal was at his best struggling with his moral delimmas in Forty Words, he has become flat, stilted, and predictable in Blackfly Season. The dialouge between Delorme and Cardinal has taken a turn for the obvious, and no longer resembles the tension inhernet in Forty Words.

The novel started out well enough, holding my attention through the first 100 pages or so, but I quickly found myself racing to get to the end. The climax to the central plot was wildly unrealistic, as if conjured up by the very Santeria Gods Cardinal and company where battling against.

I won't give away any story elements, but readers of Forty Words beware - Blackfly Season will not be remembered for much more than those annoying flys.