I thought this the best of the three series of this Canadian 'tec drama I've seen so far. It started with a bang, no pun intended, as a young married estate agent has illicit sex with his young mistress upstairs at an empty house he's marketing, then rather coldly leaves her to find her own way home only for her to unwittingly witness the shooting of a couple who enter the premises downstairs with their killer. She just manages to escape, but the murderer picks up her dropped phone and pretty soon is stalking her.
Meanwhile, Cardinal and Delorme's boss, Captain Dyson, struggling to cope with the strain of bearing the loss of her sister to cancer, then finds herself on the spot when a young man enters a laundry store armed with a hand-gun. Intent on suicide after his girl broke up with him, she tries to talk him down but a lone gunshot tells the outcome. At first, this scene seems to matter little in the unfolding narrative but is much later tied into the other main plot strand, Cardinal's refusal to accept his wife committed suicide, the cliff-hanging conclusion to the previous series. Egged on by mysterious items of mail accusing him of causing her death, his private investigations lead him to question the medical advice given to her by her up till now trusted psychiatrist.
Delorme meanwhile is striving to catch a hoodlum emptying ATM machines, but who this time kills a young passer-by who gets in his way. It turns out that the young punk is connected to the double-murderer introduced at the start and indeed, that along with another young disturbed and impressionable young female, they are all under the spell of a clearly deranged older woman, known to them as "Mama" and who is in fact grooming the youngsters to commit terrible crimes as part of her clearly established anti-societal mission.
These three plot strands are skilfully and thrillingly resolved by the excellent final episode where Cardinal has to confront his own demons as he discovers the truth about his wife's death as well as trying to stop Mama's gang from causing mayhem by escaping the lakeside cabin in which she and her youthful confederates are holed up. Yes, some aspects of the story lacked originality, like Cardinal's "Edge Of Darkness" haunted visions and the Manson-like corruption of the young damaged individuals Mama trails along in her wake but the tension ratcheted up nicely as all the pieces came together in a taut finale with just the hint of something at last warming up beneath the coolest of those exteriors of Cardinal and Delorme.
A special word in praise of the well-cast supporting players particularly, the young actor Alex Ozerov who played the sinister Mama-obsessed Jack and Glen Gould and James Downing as Cardinal and Delorme's able deputies. I hope the next series keeps up the high standards of this one.
