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Giles Blunt is a gem of a writer who has not gotten the attention he deserves. His talent transcends the mystery/suspense/thriller/procedural genre, and his work is far better than his mediocre colleagues. His newest crime novel, BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS, features series hero John Cardinal.
Cardinal is a good cop, and his wife Catherine is a photographer of some small fame who is serious about her teaching responsibilities at a local college. They are a devoted couple who, together, have lived with and fought her bipolar illness, which sadly led to her several hospitalizations. Their grown-up daughter, Kelly, lives in New York and is a struggling painter.
As BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS begins, things seem to be going along quietly and productively for the Cardinals. One evening, as the detective heads to the office to do paper work, Catherine announces that she is going out to shoot a series of pictures against the night sky, a halcyon of stars and the moon. They leave the house together to attend to their respective jobs.
Almost as soon as he reaches the station, Cardinal gets a call that the mayor will not believe that his wife is cheating on him unless he sees it with his own eyes. And that "was how Cardinal came to be sitting with the mayor of Algonquin Bay in the courtyard of the Birches Motel"…waiting to see "if" the mayor's wife really is in a room with another man. Of course she is!
The mayor jumps out of the car to confront his wife when she sneaks out of the motel room on the heels of her latest conquest. Almost simultaneously Cardinal gets a call on his cell phone from Sergeant Flower: "We got a caller says there's a dead one behind Gateway condos. You know the new building? Patrol on the scene already confirmed." The detective takes off to sort out exactly what the trouble is. A young sergeant greets him and says, "Got a dead woman back there. Looks like she took a nasty fall…I [secured] the perimeter till we know what's what." While the sergeant nervously chats on, Cardinal proceeds slowly toward the crumpled body lying next to the dumpster; he tells his young colleague that her ID should be in her car. Then, Cardinal "went down on his knees in the pool of blood and cradled the shattered woman in his arms." It was Catherine.
The community is shocked and grief-stricken. Cardinal refuses to believe that Catherine threw herself off the roof of that building. But the medical examiner can find no evidence of a struggle or proof that she was pushed. As people are notified, funeral arrangements are made, neighbors bring food to soothe the mourners and sympathy cards begin to arrive everyday. And when Kelly proceeds to open the newest stack, she cries out: "Oh my God." Cardinal wrestles it from her and reads:
"How does it feel a------?
Just no telling how things will turn out is there?"
Cardinal already was having a hard time believing that his wife's death was a suicide, thus this note feeds his paranoia and propels him into action. Still, he can't convince anyone to take him seriously and no investigation is set into motion. But that doesn't stop Cardinal, who is convinced that Catherine was murdered, especially after receiving more maniacal sympathy cards. On his own, while on "death leave," he conducts an unauthorized operation. Those who have any idea of what he's doing, including his stunned daughter, beg him to accept the "obvious" and allow himself to grieve so that at some point he can go on with his life. He goes back to his office periodically, but his only interest is learning the connection between Catherine and her killer.
Readers will find BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS moving and provocative. Mental illness, suicide, murder, grief and coping define the mainframe of this tense novel, which Blunt treats sensitively and knowledgeably. He explores the manifestations of different kinds of depression and the pain it brings to patients and their loved ones. He discusses grief and its impact on individuals with passion and empathy.
"The Planet Grief. An incalculable number of light years from the warmth of the sun…. Grief stings your eyes and sucks the breath from your lungs. No oxygen on this planet, no nitrogen; the atmosphere is composed entirely of grief."
Blunt shows his stuff as he propels readers on a journey of riveting twists and turns. As always, his characters are so real they could be your chums, and his prose style is approachable and not at all stodgy. Anyone looking for an intelligent read that is well put together and quite unusual in the procedural oeuvre will truly enjoy BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS.
Canada's John Cardinal deserves a place in the pantheon of other international sleuths, including Scotland's John Rebus (Ian Rankin), Sweden's Kurt Wallander (Henning Mankell) and Italy's Nic Costa (David Hewson), to name just a few. And Giles Blunt deserves to stand tall among the writers who created these heroes and whose splendid work is read around the world.
--- Reviewed by Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum
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