Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Forty Words for Sorrow | 2000 | Giles Blunt | Buy |
| 2 | The Delicate Storm | 2003 | Giles Blunt | Buy |
| 3 | Black Fly Season | 2005 | Giles Blunt | Buy |
| 4 | By the Time You Read This / The Fields of Grief | 2006 | Giles Blunt | Buy |
| 5 | Crime Machine | 2010 | Giles Blunt | Buy |
| 6 | Until the Night | 2012 | Giles Blunt | Buy |
The John Cardinal series by Giles Blunt consists of six crime novels published between 2000 and 2012. Detective John Cardinal works in the fictional city of Algonquin Bay, a small city in northern Ontario modeled on North Bay. Forty Words for Sorrow introduces Cardinal as he reopens the case of a missing teenager, working with his new partner Lise Delorme.
The subsequent books take Cardinal and Delorme through a range of cases set against the changing seasons of northern Ontario. The Delicate Storm involves a murder during an ice storm, Black Fly Season brings organized crime to the small city, and By the Time You Read This (also published as The Fields of Grief) takes a more personal turn. Crime Machine and Until the Night close out the series. The books were adapted into the Canadian TV series Cardinal, which ran from 2017 to 2020 on CTV.