Bad Cops, Bad Cops
By the Time You Read This (2006)
by Giles Blunt
308 pages - Random House Canada
John Cardinal is a police detective in fictional Algonquin Bay, Ontario, an obvious stand-in for the city of North Bay. At the start of the novel his wife, who has a history of severe depression, is found to have fallen from the roof of a tall building, and everyone except Cardinal considers it suicide. Then Cardinal starts receiving taunting anonymous mail, which leads him to suspect that his wife has been murdered. But everyone else thinks he is just going through stress related to her suicide. At the same time, one of the other detectives in the department is tracking down a lead consisting of some internet images of child abuse that may have taken place in Algonquin Bay. This is the fourth novel featuring detective John Cardinal, but it's the first I've read. Some UK editions of this book use the title The Fields of Grief (why? did they think *that's* the title to turn it into a bestseller?).
The author was apparently a writer for Law & Order, among other TV shows, and the novel gets off to quite a strong beginning, and the characters of people in the police department are drawn very well. I'd say it's an above-average mystery novel up until the last third, when it really takes a nosedive as the methods of the various villains are brought to the forefront. One of the main problems in both investigations is that it seems that very obvious pieces of evidence are ignored or not followed up on until the plot calls for them. Also, the villain behind the rash of 'suicides' is just not believable the way he's portrayed (even though the narrative goes out of its way to mention a real-life figure who was the obvious inspiration). Also, I think the child abuse/pornography subplot is a cliche right up there with having a subplot with a wiser older character who was a holocaust survivor (which seems to be on the back of half the books on the remainder shelves). I don't have anything against exploring these topics in an in-depth or original way, but when inserted into a thriller they're usually just a lazy way to try to stimulate people's emotional responses. And the way the author goes into details of the child abuse, it seemed to be there either to titillate or otherwise existed on almost a parody level, since it went on for unnecessary pages.
But I don't think that's what the author was trying to do. He probably wasn't trying to do much of anything other than tell a story to take up some time, since if you think of some of the issues that are brought up, such as suicide or therapy or depression, the novel has really muddled views that wouldn't bear much scrutiny. It does start with some promise, but all you need to know about the level of cliche it descends to is that in the end the detective leaves the police station all alone to arrest his wife's murderer, not even calling for backup when he finds a dead body, and personally carries the one convincing piece of evidence along (presumably before any copy of it has been made), so he can dramatically brandish it in the one-on-one show-down finale.