Series: Quirke
by Author John Banville
Christine Falls (2015)
Benjamin Black is the pseudonym for Booker-prize winning author John Banville, and this novel reads very much like a practitioner of high literary fiction swapped his tweed blazer for a trench coat. And yet Banville does not seem able to match the concomitant gait and attitude of the trench-coat ...
Holy Orders (2013)
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...
Death In Summer (2011)
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...
A Death in Summer. Benjamin Black (2011)
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...
En busca de April (2010)
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...
Congetture su April (2010)
This is the third Quirke book. In this story, a friend of Phoebe's goes missing. Her name is April Latimer. She is a junior doctor at Quirke's hospital and her family is quite well known in Dublin. Quirke has gone in to rehab to try to get off alcohol and when Phoebe visits him, she tells him of ...