With Forty Words for Sorrow, a portrait of a string of murders in small-town northern Ontario, author Giles Blunt has delivered something Canadian crime writers could hitherto never quite get right: a uniquely Canuck template of mayhem, at once as familiar as a Tim Hortons parking lot and as chilling as frozen skin. Blunt has given our burgeoning True North mystery genre its primal scene: figures in a bleak landscape, up to no good.

When the body of a long-missing native girl is found in an abandoned mine shaft, ex-homicide inspector John Cardinal is persuaded to head the investigation. Cardinal – plain-spoken, thoughtful, a solid husband and father – finds himself in an uneasy middle age: his former department is investigating him for alleged kickbacks, and his chronically disturbed wife has lost her grip on reality. Cardinal’s old casebook is reopened when three more teenagers go missing and it becomes plain that a sex killer is hiding in tiny Algonquin Bay.

At first glance, the novel’s narrative scaffolding appears standard for the genre, especially the hero’s buffeting public and private lives. Blunt has also included some of the biggest clichés in the business, including the gratuitously hostile co-worker (who exists to ratchet up the artificial tension at work) and the hormone-arousing female colleague (who exists to ratchet up the artificial tension at home).

But after the first few chapters the novel starts to grip. Previously flat characters spring to life, and the accumulation of clues turns icily labyrinthine. Blunt has an unfailing, piercing sense of place – of dreary, slushy roads, of early darkness, and what it means to be cold and frustrated in a northern town. Forty Words for Sorrow satisfies right down to the marrow, and – who knows – might even be made into the kind of feature film that freezes out all those Cape Breton pregnancy, and urban dating flicks.