A terrifying psychological thriller from a major new talent, set in the freezing north Canadian winter . . .
When four teenagers go missing in the small town of Algonquin Bay, the extensive police investigation draws a blank. 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 he will die.
Evoking the Ontario winter and the hearts of the killers and detectives in icily realistic prose, 'Forty Words For Sorrow' is a masterful psychological thriller that rivals the best of Martin Cruz Smith and introduces readers to a complex hero whose own human faults serve to fuel his unerring sense of justice.
