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Overview

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 ...

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More About This Book

Overview

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

Marilyn Stasio
For all the gruesome violence he depicts in this story about a drug merchant who disposes of the competition in occult rituals, Blunt extends extraordinary sympathy to the small-time dealers and junkies caught up in an environmental plague more devastating than any devised by nature.
— The New York Times
More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
From The Critics
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. Agent, Helen Heller. (June) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780425233719
  • Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
  • Publication date: 9/29/2009
  • Edition description: Reprint
  • Pages: 400
  • Sales rank: 833,981
  • Product dimensions: 5.00 (w) x 7.90 (h) x 1.00 (d)

Meet the Author

Giles Blunt wrote for television in New York City before returning to Toronto three years ago. He is the author of Forty Words for Sorrow and The Delicate Storm.

Read an Excerpt

Blackfly Season

By Giles Blunt

Random House

Giles Blunt
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0679314423

Chapter One

Chapter 1

Anybody who has spent any length of time in Algonquin Bay will tell you there are plenty of good reasons to live somewhere else. There is the distance from civilization, by which Canadians mean Toronto, 250 miles south. There is the gradual decay of the once-charming downtown, victim to the twin scourges of suburban malls and an unlucky series of fires. And, of course, there are the winters, which are ferocious, snowy and long. It's not unusual for winter to extend its bone-numbing grip into April, and the last snowfall often occurs in May.

Then there are the blackflies. Every year, following an all-too-brief patch of spring weather, blackflies burst from the beds of northern Ontario's numberless rivers and streams to feast on the blood of birds, livestock and the citizens of Algonquin Bay. They're well equipped for it, too. The blackfly may be less than a quarter-inch long, but up close it resembles an attack helicopter, fitted with a sucker at one end and a nasty hook at the other. Even one of these creatures can be a misery. Caught in a swarm, a person can very rapidly go mad.

The World Tavern may not have looked too crazy on this particular Friday, but Blaine Styles, the bartender, knew there would be problems. Blackfly season just doesn't bring out the best in people -- those that drink, anyway. Blaine wasn't a hundred percent sure which quarter the trouble would come from, but he had his candidates.

For one, there was the trio of dorks at the bar -- a guy named Regis and his two friends in baseball caps, Bob and Tony. They were drinking quietly, but they had flirted a little too long with Darla, the waitress, and there was a restlessness about them that didn't bode well for later. For another, there was the table at the back by the map of Africa. They'd been drinking Molson pretty steadily for a couple of hours now. Quiet, but steady. And then there was the girl, a redhead Blaine had never seen before who kept moving from table to table in a way that he found -- professionally speaking -- disturbing.

A Labatt Blue bottle flew across the room and hit the map of Canada just above Newfoundland. Blaine shot from behind the bar and waltzed the drunk who'd thrown it out the door before he could even protest. It bothered Blaine that he hadn't even seen this one coming. The jerk had been sitting with a couple of guys in leather jackets under France, and hadn't raised even a blip on the bartender's radar. The World Tavern, oldest and least respectable gin joint in Algonquin Bay, could get pretty hairy on a Friday night, especially in blackfly season, and Blaine preferred to set the limits early.

He went back behind the bar and poured a couple of pitchers for the table over by the map of Africa -- getting a little louder, he noticed. Then there was an order for six continentals and a couple of frozen margaritas that kept him hopping. After that there was a slack period, and he rested his foot on a beer case, easing his back while he washed a few glasses.

There weren't too many regulars tonight; he was glad about that. Television shows would have you believe that the regulars in a bar are eccentrics with hearts of gold, but Blaine found they were mostly just hopeless dipwads with serious issues around self-esteem. The stained, shellacked maps on the walls of the World Tavern were the closest these people would ever get to leaving Algonquin Bay.

Jerry Commanda was sitting at the end of the bar nursing his usual Diet Coke with a squeeze of lemon and reading Maclean's. A bit of a mystery, Jerry. On the whole, Blaine liked him, despite his being a regular -- respected him, anyway -- even if he was an awful tipper.

Jerry used to be a serious drinker -- not a complete alky, but a serious drinker. This was back when he was in high school, maybe into his early twenties. But then something had sobered him up and he'd never touched alcohol again. Didn't set foot in the World or any other bar for five, six years after that. Then, a few years ago, he'd started coming in on Friday nights, and he'd always park his skinny butt at the end of the bar. You could see everything that was going on from there.

Blaine had once asked Jerry how he'd kicked the bottle, if he'd gone the twelve-step route.

"Couldn't stand twelve-step," Jerry had said. "Couldn't stand the meetings. Everyone saying they're powerless, asking God to get them out of this pickle." Jerry used words like that now and again, even though he was only about forty. Old-fashioned words like pickle or fellow or cantankerous. "But it turned out to be pretty easy to quit alcohol, once I figured out what I had to do was quit thinking, not drinking."

"No one can quit thinking," Blaine had said. "Thinking's like breathing. Or sweating. It's just something you do."

Jerry then launched into some weird psychological bushwah. Said it might be true you couldn't stop the thoughts from coming, but you could change what you did with them. The secret was being able to sidestep them. Blaine remembered the words exactly because Jerry was a four-time Ontario kick-boxing champion, and when he'd said sidestep he'd made a nifty little manoeuvre that looked kind of, well, disciplined.

So Jerry Commanda had learned to sidestep his thoughts, and the result was him parking himself at the end of the bar every Friday night for an hour or so, with his Diet Coke and his squeeze of lemon. Blaine figured it was partly to deter some of the young guys from the reserve from drinking too much. Pretty hard for them to cut loose with the reserve's best-known cop sitting at the bar, reading a magazine and sipping his Coke. Some of them, minute they saw him, just did a 180 and walked out.

Blaine swept his wary bartender's gaze over his domain. The Africa table was definitely getting boisterous. Boisterous was okay, but it was just one level down from obnoxious. Blaine cocked his head to one side, listening for warning notes -- the gruff challenge, the outraged cry that was inevitably followed by the scraping of a chair. Except for the bottle tosser, it looked to be a peaceful night. The bottle tosser, and the girl.


From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpted from Blackfly Season by Giles Blunt Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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  • Posted August 6, 2009

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    I Also Recommend:

    Compelling and gripping Black Fly Season

    I just finished my third read of "Black Fly Season." It's a novel that I enjoy reading now and then, and I thought it was time to let others know about this fantastically, well-written crime thriller. Blunt does an excellent job of evoking an atmosphere of the locale of the story (Algonquin Bay, Ontario). His characters are well defined. I found his use of forensics in the story fascinating, e.g., getting clues from entomological research. The villain, in addition to being a drug dealer, practices Palo Mayombe, a form of voodoo/black magic that involves human sacrifice, and homicide detectives John Cardinal and Lise Delorme race against time to stop the murders. In the meantime, Cardinal is facing his own personal fears and heartbreak. There are twists and turns in "Black Fly Season" that will keep the pages quickly turning. This is the third novel in the John Cardinal series, but it stands alone on its own merit if you haven't read the other two books. "Black Fly Season" is compelling and gripping. This is no wishy-washy crime novel. Giles Blunt is a superior crime novelist.

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  • Posted December 9, 2008

    more from this reviewer

    great time for police procedural fans

    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 us 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

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