His first novel, Cold Eye, was a psychological thriller set in the New York art world, which was made into the French movie Les Couleurs du diable (Allain Jessua, 1997).
Blunt is also the author of the John Cardinal novels, set in the small city of Algonquin Bay, in Northern Ontario.
The first Cardinal story, Forty Words for Sorrow, won the British Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger, and the second, The Delicate Storm, won the Crime Writers of Canada's Arthur Ellis Award for best novel, as did the sixth, Until the Night.
The 2010 John Cardinal novel Crime Machine was described as "a richly plotted work by one of Canada's best mystery novelists.
Twice nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award,[2] his novels have been compared to the work of Ian Rankin and Cormac McCarthy.