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UNTIL THE NIGHT
by Giles Blunt
Random House Canada, August 2012
325 pages
$29.95 CAD
ISBN: 0679314350


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

The four-year gap in John Cardinal's career that followed BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS (UK: FIELDS OF GRIEF) led some readers to fear that they had seen the last of that stoical northern Ontario copper who had seen too much sorrow. But then along came CRIME MACHINE, in which Cardinal picks up the pieces of his life and moves forward with grim determination. And now we have UNTIL THE NIGHT, certainly one of the very best in the series. Here Blunt broadens his frame of reference - Algonquin Bay (read North Bay, Ontario) is still the centre of contemporary activity, but Ottawa and Toronto are not all that far away and the great cold expanse of the high Arctic, beautiful and full of menace, broods over it all.

The first homicide that Cardinal is called out on seems routine enough, except, perhaps for the means. A man is found dead in a motel, boot marks on his throat indicating that he was killed by someone standing on his throat. As he was a married man in a motel with a woman not his wife and the crime looks improvised, the assumption is that it had something to do with jealousy. But until the woman with whom he was sharing a motel room with surfaces, it is difficult to prove much.

This particular investigation stalls fairly rapidly, but not before we get a look at the new strains in Cardinal's professional life. A new and reputedly hot-shot copper has been imported from Toronto and very full of himself he is too. The reader will have to wait for most of the novel to see if he gets what's coming to him, but it's hardly a spoiler to say that he does and that it comes in a form that will entertain connoisseurs of famous true-crime investigations.

Cardinal has other problems as well. He has had a long and satisfactory friendship with Lise Delorme, his partner. But now he is beginning to be aware that he is becoming seriously attracted to her, indeed, perhaps falling in love. Poor John has so disciplined his feelings over the years that he is baffled to know how to express himself and Lise, who appears to be going through a bit of a mid-life crisis of her own, does not know how to respond to him. The fact that she is pursuing a sexual addict who she believes is responsible for murder does not help. This particular thread involves a considerable amount obscene chat passing as flirtation that some readers might find hard to take, but there is nothing there that is gratuitously included and certainly nothing intentionally erotic. It is, however, content that seems to me to mark a departure for this series.

The other, and far more important, departure is contained in the Blue Notebook entries that detail what happened on an Arctic research station some twenty years in the past. Interspersed between chapters that continue the story of the investigation into the growing number of women found frozen to death in various locations from Ottawa to Algonquin Bay, these capture the reader's attention immediately, even if their significance does not emerge for quite a while. Some of the strongest writing in the book is contained in these entries, gripping both for the tension and drama of the events themselves, but even more for their powerful evocation of the spell the Arctic can wield over those who travel there and of the landscape and the beauties and terrors it holds.

In an afterword, Blunt acknowledges that this was a book that required considerable research. It can stand as a textbook example of how to assimilate secondary material seamlessly into a novel so that the reader is convinced that the author has spent a decade or two on the Arctic ice. These journal entries open the book up to a far larger landscape than even the empty winter shores of Algonquin Lake.

With UNTIL THE NIGHT, Blunt has added another strong entry to a series that shines as serious, committed, and, without ever resorting to cliché, thoroughly Canadian.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, July 2012

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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