The Delicate Storm

The book that I read was “The Delicate Storm” by Giles Blunt.

One of the detectives in the novel was named John Cardinal. As many of the characters said in the novel Cardinal was very serious about his work. He would never let anything interfere with his work life that was from his private life. One of the other detectives that he worked with Lise Delorme said in the novel “I don’t think I have ever heard him once talk about his wife or his daughter. He just doesn’t like to talk about it.” Cardinal was called to the scene when there was a severed arm – with no hand – found near Algonquin Bay. He was less than pleased when he found out that the arm belonged to a US citizen and the Mounties were called in to help with the case. Cardinal felt that he should only work with people that he knew well, and especially people that he worked well with, and the RCMP were not either of those kinds of people to him. Cardinal was able to get the job done even if he did have to work with the RCMP.


The first clue that showed up in the novel was a severed arm with no hand. There had been an unusual warm front in January that awoke bears, so they were the first suspect but they were soon ruled out of the picture. Throughout further investigation they found out that the body belonged to a former CIA agent who worked in Montreal in 1970 during the French Canadian separatist movement that turned violent. Cardinal finally reached a point where every clue led to a dead end, until a doctor from Toronto went missing one night and her naked body was found in an isolated part of town. The police were able to link up the two murders because of the rare AB blood type that was found in the doctor’s office and in the first victim’s car. They began to believe that the perpetrator was injured and need medical assistance. In order to solve the murders the two detectives, John Cardinal and Lise Delorme, have to travel to Montreal to try to reconstruct events that happened over three-decades ago in hopes that one of their interviewees is the killer.


“First came the warmth. Three weeks after New Year’s and the thermometer did what it never does in January in Algonquin Bay: it rose above the freezing mark. Within a matter of hours the streets were shiny and black with melted snow.” This quote appealed to me because it was one of the opening lines in the book. I felt that right from the beginning the author was putting you on the edge when he says “Three weeks after New Year’s and the thermometer did what it never does in January in Algonquin Bay:” I thought this was a good piece of writing because he pauses briefly and then he continues on with his sentence. It kind of left you on the edge wondering what he was going to say next.

“Shep!” Bergeron waded through the fog, one hand out before him like a blind man. “Shep! For God’s sake, can it, willya?” I thought that this was another great piece of writing from the book because this was the scene before a part of the first body was found in Algonquin Bay. It was discovered by a man who lived near where the body was found he was working on some snowmobiles for some customers of his. His dog had gone out near the lake and started barking because it had found a severed arm. So Bergeron told his dog to be quiet and when his dog kept barking he went over to see what the big deal was. Turns out the big deal was part of the dead body.

“They’d make you wait, anyways, no matter how many of them there were,” Stan said. “It’s a class thing. Class not only must exist, it must be seen to exist. Making you wait is their way of saying, ‘I’m important and you’re not.’”
 I found that this was another important part in the novel because this is one of the only times that we ever hear about Cardinal’s personal life. He takes his dad (Stan) to the doctor for a checkup with the doctor because Stan believes that he is fit to drive and Cardinal disagrees with him. When they are in the waiting room Stan is getting mad at the doctor’s office because he has to wait even though they were on time for their appointment. This gets Stan extremely upset and Cardinal then has to try to calm him down when the doctor comes out.