A Death in Summer
A Novel
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A powerful man's suspicious suicide has Dublin on a boil in the fourth Quirke volume, named one of the Chicago Tribune's Best Reads of the Year
On a sweltering summer afternoon, newspaper tycoon Richard Jewell—known to his many enemies as Diamond Dick—is discovered with his head blown off by a shotgun blast. But is it suicide or murder? For help with the investigation, Detective Inspector Hackett calls in his old friend Quirke, who has an unusual level of access to Dublin's elite.
Jewell's coolly elegant French wife, Françoise, seems less than shocked by her husband's death. But Dannie, Jewell's high-strung sister, is devastated, and Quirke is surprised to learn that in her grief she has turned to an unexpected friend: David Sinclair, Quirke's ambitious assistant in the pathology lab at the Hospital of the Holy Family. To complicate things further, an unlikely romance has begun to blossom between Sinclair and Quirke's fractious daughter Phoebe. As a record heat wave envelops the city and the secrets underlying Diamond Dick's empire come to light, Quirke and Hackett find themselves caught up in a dark maze of intrigue and violence that threatens to end in disaster.
Tightly plotted and gorgeously written, A Death in Summer is John Banville at his thrilling best.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Black's flat fourth crime novel set in 1950s Ireland (after Elegy for April) takes Dublin pathologist Quirke to Brook-lands, the country estate of newspaper baron Richard "Diamond Dick" Jewell, whose nearly headless body is found one summer afternoon in his office above the stables. Jewell appears to have blown his head off with the shotgun still in his hand, but Quirke suspects foul play. Jewell's beautiful widow, Fran oise d'Aubigny, who flatters Quirke by remembering their previous brief meeting a year before, suggests that a feud was brewing between Jewell and another rich Dubliner, Carlton Sumner. Quirke unearths a connection between Jewell and St. Christopher's, an orphanage where he himself briefly lived. When threatening phone calls escalate into violence, Quirke must watch his back. The failure of Black (the pen name of Booker-winner John Banville) to make much of the demise of such a powerful figure and Quirke's unlikely attraction to the dead man's wife help make this Black's weakest effort yet.
