By the Time You Read This.

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Readers of the outstanding procedurals featuring John Cardinal of the Algonquin Bay (North Bay), Ontario, police will recall that at the end of the last novel, Blackfly Season, Cardinal’s wife had been readmitted to the regional mental heath centre, stricken again by depression. This book begins with her shocking death a few months later. So conclusive is the evidence of suicide that there is no official case, but Cardinal is tormented by a combination of survivor’s guilt and the belief that his wife could not have done such a thing, and he begins unofficially and on his own to investigate. At the same time, his frequent partner, Lise Delorme, is involved with a revolting case of child sexual abuse on the Internet that may have a connection to Algonquin Bay.

North Bay native Blunt writes and plots superbly, and through his four novels we have to come to care for Derlorme and Cardinal, and Cardinal’s wife and semi-estranged daughter. His sense of place for northeastern Ontario adds much to his skills as a storyteller. With colourfully drawn minor characters, paths of inquiry that sometimes lead nowhere, and two loathsome villains, he builds to a page-turning climax that brings the investigations of Cardinal and Delorme together, and has written perhaps his best John Cardinal mystery yet.