Christine Falls by Benjamin Black: A First in Series MystereBook

Christine Falls by Benjamin Black. A Quirke Mystery. First Appearance: March 2007.

It's no secret that first-time crime novelist Benjamin Black is, indeed, Booker Prize-winning author John Banville. In an entertaining twist on the use of a pen name, Banville even "confronts" Black in an interview published just after Christine Falls landed on bookshelves in 2007. We had the pleasure of reading and reviewing the novel when it first came out, calling it "a stylish, atmospheric thriller that is both beautifully written and solidly plotted." (Mysterious Reviews, 2007.)

Black's protagonist is Dublin pathologist Quirke, and the mysteries in the series — there are, to date, four with the fifth, Vengeance, to be published next month — are set in the 1950s. The author describes Quirke as "a tall, powerful character more at ease among the cold silent slabs than the company of his fellow men" and yet through his investigations he "discovers that the living might just be every bit as captivating as the dead."

The publisher, Henry Holt, is currently offering the ebook formats of this first in series for just $3.99. We think you'll find Christine Falls just as we did, an "elegantly crafted book with [a] haunting story [that] is deeply satisfying."

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Christine Falls
Benjamin Black
A Quirke Mystery
Henry Holt, April 2010 ebook

Also available: Hardcover, Trade Paperback, Audible Audio formats

It's not the dead that seem strange to Quirke. It's the living. 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. 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.

It turns out the body belonged to a young woman named Christine Falls. 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.

      

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