Blackfly Season [Hardcover]

Giles Blunt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2, 2005

Winner of Britain's Silver Dagger and Canada's Arthur Ellis awards, shortlisted for Bouchercon's Hammett, Anthony, and Macavity prizes, Giles Blunt returns with this third intensely disturbing crime novel.

When a beautiful young woman stumbles into a rough Algonquin Bay tavern covered in black fly bites, bits of leaves stuck in her curly red hair, the bartender knows she is either dumb or high. No one in Algonquin Bay goes out unprotected in black fly season.

"Red," as the local cops come to call her, is neither, but it takes a full examination to discover that her woozy behavior isn't due to drugs or diminished mental capacity. Red has a bullet in her brain. And no memory of how it got there or who she is.

If homicide detectives John Cardinal and Lisa Delorme haven't a clue to her identity, they do know she is in mortal danger. Someone tried to kill her. Someone thought she was dead. Someone will try again if word leaks out she is not.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Silver Dagger–winner Blunt spins a highly disturbing but truly memorable tale about a Canadian cult's murder spree. After homicide detective John Cardinal is called in to talk to a young woman who wandered into an Algonquin Bay bar sans ID, keys or memory, doctors examining her find a bullet in her brain. Figuring whoever tried to kill her may want to finish the job, Cardinal puts the woman, dubbed "Red" for her coppery hair, into seclusion. Backed by partner Lise Delorme, Cardinal begins assembling what pieces of information he's been able to gather, and the investigation quickly takes the team from the mundane (drugs, bikers) to the grisly (a string of dismemberment killings apparently committed by a Cuban cult known as Palo Mayombe). The action will glue readers to the page, but the plot is equally moving in its quieter, more poignant moments when Cardinal, whose wife suffers from bouts of severe depression, must take time to handle family matters. Based on a true crime, the pulsing, tightly plotted narrative again shows why Blunt (Forty Words for Sorrow) should be considered among the new practitioners of crime drama's elite.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Blunt sets his highly acclaimed Cardinal and Delorme series in Canada's remote Algonquin Bay, which is far from civilization (the closest city, Toronto, is 250 miles to the south), far from prosperous, and filled with such daily-living challenges as relentless winter storms followed by the spring arrival of rapacious black flies. The locals' obsession with protecting themselves from the onslaught of the flies makes them all the more shocked when a woman enters a bar, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she's covered in fly bites. The woman has no idea where she is, or who she is, and when the cops take her to the hospital, doctors discover that her thick red hair has been obscuring a bullet hole in her skull--the bullet lodged in her brain is responsible for her amnesia. Series homicide detectives John Cardinal and Lisa Delorme take on the case, which links to a vicious motorcycle gang and a series of ritualistic murders. As in his previous two series entries --Forty Words for Sorrow (2001) and The Delicate Storm (2003)--Blunt transposes an actual true-crime story, this time about ritual killings along the Mexican border, into the North Woods. But it's what Blunt does with the true-crime graft that is amazing. His characters, even to the lonely guy sitting by himself at the end of the bar, are wonderfully realistic; his pacing never flags; his knowledge of police procedure is accurate without being show-offy; and he leaves the reader not so much with a story as with a glimpse into a perfectly realized world. First-rate. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: A Marian Wood Book/Putnam (June 2, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399152555
• ISBN-13: 978-0399152559
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,310,135 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Classic Page-Turner, September 10, 2005

By 

Gary Griffiths (Los Altos Hills, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Blackfly Season (Hardcover)

"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.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Murder, magic and some top-notch forensics in Northern Ontario., June 22, 2005

By 

S. Schwartz "romonko" (alberta canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Blackfly Season (Hardcover)

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exquisite Mystery - Top Of The Genre, August 14, 2005

By 

Jon Linden (Warren, N.J. United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Blackfly Season (Hardcover)

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.