The sleuth here is Dublin pathologist Garret Quirke. Alas, at least in this first entry that's not the case. After all, he'd shown himself to be an able imitator and the police procedural would give him an opportunity to expand his horizons, with an investigation touching upon multiple layers of society and presumably a varied cast of characters. But when word came that he was turning his hand to a series of mysteries, written under a quite public pseudonym for some reason, it seemed likely he could redeem himself. Descending into willful obscurity is certain to win literary prizes but pretty much designed to thwart readership.

When critics opined that his latter few were - perhaps inevitably for a serious Irish author - influenced by Joyce, Beckett, Proust and company, it only made him all the easier to ignore. His facility with the genre was impressive enough but the form is so dark and claustrophobic that the exercise couldn't help but wear thin.

Quirke is a fascinating and subtly drawn hero, Christine Falls is a classic tale of suspense, and Benjamin Black's debut marks him as a true master of the form.I read and admired a couple of John Banville's earlier gothic novels, but admiration isn't necessarily enjoyment and I'd felt no great compunction to read the successors. Set in Dublin and Boston in the 1950s, the first novel in the Quirke series brings all the vividness and psychological insight of Booker Prize winner John Banville's fiction to a thrilling, atmospheric crime story. And as Quirke reluctantly presses on toward the true facts behind her death, he comes up against some insidious-and very well-guarded-secrets of Dublin's high Catholic society, among them members of his own family. It turns out the body belonged to a young woman named Christine Falls. Odd enough in itself to find Malachy there, but the next morning, when the haze has lifted, it looks an awful lot like his brother-in-law, the esteemed doctor, was in fact tampering with a corpse-and concealing the cause of death. One night, after a few drinks at an office party, Quirke shuffles down into the morgue where he works and finds his brother-in-law, Malachy, altering a file he has no business even reading. In the debut crime novel from the Booker-winning author, a Dublin pathologist follows the corpse of a mysterious woman into the heart ofĪ conspiracy among the city's high Catholic society It's not the dead that seem strange to Quirke.

Christine falls novel