He makes Griffin the foster brother of Quirke. The closer Quirke gets to unravelling this conspiracy, the more dangerous his investigation becomes and before long he’s being warned off in no uncertain terms.īlack/Banville adds additional layers to this quite straightforward storyline. Its tentacles stretch across the Atlantic to New England, and goes back several generations. Seeking to discover the real cause of the woman’s death, Quirke finds himself in the midst of a conspiracy, which involves not only Griffin but the upper echelons of Dublin society and the Catholic Church. I might have been holed up in my sick bed at the time, but I think my reaction would have been the same regardless: I just could not bear to put this book down and finished it in one sitting.Įssentially the story, which is set in 1950s Dublin, is about a pathologist, the love-worn Quirke, who discovers a colleague, Griffin, altering a file to cover up the cause of death of a young woman called Christine Falls. I’m a longtime Banville fan and was intrigued as to how he would handle the crime genre given he’s largely made his name on the back of (high brow) literary fiction.Ĭhristine Falls is certainly an intriguing and arresting read. Which partly explains why I rushed out and bought this in hardcover.

It’s no secret that the author of this book, Benjamin Black, is actually Booker prize-winning novelist John Banville in disguise.

Fiction – hardcover Picador 384 pages 2006.

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