Christine Falls
A Novel
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3.6 • 16 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
One of Stephen King's Best Books of the 21st Century
"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).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this expertly paced debut thriller from Irish author Black (the pseudonym of Booker Prize winner John Banville), pathologist Garret Quirke uncovers a web of corruption in 1950s Dublin surrounding the death in childbirth of a young maid, Christine Falls. Quirke is pulled into the case when he confronts his stepbrother, physician Malachy Griffin, who's altering Christine's file at the city morgue. Soon it appears the entire establishment is in denial over Christine's mysterious demise and in a conspiracy that recalls the classic film Chinatown. And the deeper Quirke delves into the mystery, the more it seems to implicate his own family and the Catholic church. At the start, the novel has the spare melancholy of early James Joyce, describing a Dublin of private clubs, Merrion Square townhouses and the occasional horse-drawn cart; as the plot heats up and the action shifts to Boston, Mass., it becomes more of a standard detective story. Though Black makes an occasional American cultural blooper, he keeps divulging surprises to the last page so that the reader is simultaneously shocked and satisfied. Author tour.
