This is as good as contemporary crime writing gets! A literary quality, so lacking in other journeymen & women of this unfairly under-rated genre, sparkles & gleams amongst the mists, drizzles & fogs of mid-50's Dublin - & it's not just a superficial sheen either, but a deep & reverberating prese...
The chain smoking of the main protagonists in this novel tells us it takes place a few decades ago. The setting is Dublin in the fifties, a soiled sort of city – what I recall most vividly of Dublin long ago was the smell of the Liffey and (I have an abiding memory of) noisy bus brakes in need of...
I liked Black's 'Black eyed blonde' a lot, so I thought I would check out his other works. This one was a disappointment. It is clear Black (or I should say, John Banville) has a lot of talent but he badly bungles this 'thriller'. Notoriously wealthy Dublin tycoon Richard 'Diamond Dick' Jewell is...
I had the advantage of reading this almost entirely on a 5 1/2 hour plane ride from DC to Portland and I think it benefited from being read in one sitting. As always, the Benjamin Black books are much more about the characters than the mystery, but this one had both working at a high level. I c...