Very often when an author changes genre and picks a pseudonym so not to confuse his existing fans, he makes a secret of it and the publishers sell it into the trade as a first novel and only sometimes acknowledges it as being from an established ‘bestselling’ name. Well, here there is no secret. We know that Benjamin Black is John Banville, winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2005 with The Sea, so we know the quality of writing is going to be good but can a literary prize winner write crime? Oh yes … this is startlingly disturbing, gripping stuff introducing an aptly named series character, Quirke, in a complex, absorbing plot centred around a secret society within the Catholic Church in Dublin. It’s first-rate.
The hero of Christine Falls, Quirke, is a surly pathologist living in 1950s Dublin. One night, after having a few drinks at a party, he returns to the morgue to find his brother-in-law tampering with the records on a young woman's corpse. The next morning, when his hangover has worn off, Quirke reluctantly begins looking into the woman's history. He discovers a plot that spans two continents, implicates the Catholic Church, and may just involve members of his own family. He is warned--first subtly, then with violence--to lay off, but Quirke is a stubborn man. The first novel in the Quirke series brings all the vividness and psychological insight of John Banville's writing to the dark, menacing atmosphere of a first-class thriller.
