Christine Falls - (Quirke) by John Banville & Benjamin Black (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"It was not the dead that seemed to Quirke uncanny but the living."

Quirke is a haunted, hard-drinking pathologist stumbling through the brooding gloom of 1950s Dublin. It is a society of secrets and meanness, dominated by a rigid hierarchy--as Quirke is reminded of when he catches his well-connected brother-in-law faking morgue records.

The cause of this tampering is the corpse of a mysterious woman: Christine Falls. But who is she, and how did she die? Quirke's hunt for the answers to these questions will draw him into a transatlantic conspiracy and pit him against some of Dublin's most powerful forces, from the Catholic Church to members of his own family.

Originally published under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, John Banville's debut thriller reveals a new side of "Ireland's greatest living novelist" (The New York Times).

Review Quotes

Praise for Christine Falls

"Swirling, elegant noir. . . . Crossover fiction of a very high order. . . .Rolls forward with haunting, sultry exoticism. . .toward the best kind of denouement under these circumstances: a half inconclusive one."
--The New York Times

"The numerous characters are each distinct and credible, atmosphere fairly reeks from every page, Banville's control and pacing cannot be faulted, and the final outcome is bleak, creepy and almost unbearably moving....[Banville] deserves to win a new, broader readership with this fine book."
--The Guardian

"A page-turner told in prose so beautiful you'll want to read some passages repeatedly. Intricately plotted, beautifully written."
--The Boston Globe

"Offers a subtler, deeper satisfaction than just finding out whodunit. . . .What's most disconcerting of all about Christine Falls is the atmosphere of moral claustrophobia enveloping it."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Banville's sentences take us out into the wild and show us the living, breathing, noisome actual in its natural habitat."
--The Believer

"Crime fiction rarely lives up to the term 'literary, ' but [Christine Falls] is the happy exception."
--Entertainment Weekly

"Measured, taut, and transfixing . . . [Banville's] plotting is methodical, detailed, and always gripping. You can smell the smoke in Quirke's favorite pub and touch the cool walls in a Boston convent he later visits."
--USA Today

Praise for John Banville

"Ireland's greatest living novelist...a literary polymath."
--The New York Times

"A grand writer with a seductive style."
--The New York Times Book Review

"The Irish master."
--The New Yorker

"One of the best novelists in English."
--The Guardian

"One of the most imaginative literary novelists writing in the English language today.
--The Washington Post

"[Banville's] books are like baroque cathedrals."
--The Paris Review

"Prodigiously gifted. He cannot write an unpolished phrase."
--The Independent

"One periodically rereads a [Banville] sentence just to marvel at its beauty."
--USA Today

"Banville is a master at capturing the most fleeting memory or excruciating twinge of self-awareness with riveting accuracy."
--People

About the Author

JOHN BANVILLE was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of numerous novels, including The Sea, which won the 2005 Booker Prize, and the DI Quirke novels. In 2011 he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, in 2013 he was awarded the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Achievement in Irish Literature, and in 2014 he won the Prince of Asturias Award, Spain's most important literary prize. He lives in Dublin.