Christine Falls (Quirke Series #1) Book

This, the first in the series of detective novels written pseudonymously by John Banville, is set in 1950's Dublin and features the melancholy pathologist Quirke, who, though scarred by failure and a widower's grief, still possesses a spark of intellectual curiosity and a few glowing embers of compassion. When he discovers his brother-in-law, a prosperous physician, altering the death records of young Christine Falls, he begins an investigation that leads him through the low and high ranks of Dublin society and across the Atlantic to Boston, where a conspiracy by prominent citizens of both nations--as well as certain institutions of the Roman Catholic Church--is soon revealed.

Banville is a fine writer, and I don't think you'll find a bad metaphor or a poorly balanced sentence anywhere in this book. He develops his characters so economically and tells his tale so efficiently that he is also able to include a few bravura literary showpieces (a description of a St. Stephen's Green beating, the last thoughts of a murderer soon to crash his car) without interrupting the flow of his narrative or calling undue attention to his elegant prose.

If I have a quarrel with the book, it is a minor one: I do not think that Banville quite gives the genre its due. "Christine Falls" is a good novel and a good mystery, but it is not always both of these things, at the same time, together.

Banville, however, is such a good writer that I am sure he solves this problem in later entries in the series. I look forward to reading about Quirke again.