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Loading... Christine Falls: A Novel (Quirke) (edition 2008)by Benjamin Black (Author)
Work InformationChristine Falls by Benjamin Black
Books Read in 2016 (1,831) EU Fiction: 1950-2022 (184) Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Book 1 of 7 book series - Quirke is a middle age,boozing pathologist working in the hospital morgue when he starts to unravels a mystery of a dead young girl, a missing baby and how in the world is his family connected to all of this - this mystery which escalates into murder. Along the way Quirke comes to terms of his actions to acknowledge the child he let go when his wife died. Its a twisted story that Quirke appears to be the one and only willing to set the record straight. No matter the concenquences. ( ) Actually a 3.5 star. I really wanted to like this book more than I did. I liked the main character and I liked the mystery but the pacing of the book was a little slow for me. Black likes words and uses them well but I sometimes felt like he was trying to build mood at the cost of the plotting. The setting was wonderful though and I think there was enough there that I might try book 2. If you like faster paced mysteries this book will not be for you., A bleak story of corruption involving the export of babies of unwed mothers to the US where they will be adopted and raised to become nuns and priests. Quirke, a pathologist, is investigating the death of a young mother after discovering records being falsified by his brother-in-law. An unpleasant, dark story told in Black's elegant yet melancholy style. Writing as Benjamin Black, John Banville made an impressive debut as a mystery writer in 2006 with “Christine Falls.” Dark, moody and muddled (in a good way), the story manages to rise above genre to become literature of the sort the author writes under his own name. The title character, a young Irish woman named Christine Falls, is dead before the first page. Quirke, a pathologist in 1950s Dublin, notices nothing amiss until he catches Mal, his brother-in-law who is also a doctor, altering the death records late at night. Yet Quirke is drunk at the time, so later he isn't sure he remembers what he thinks he remembers. The woman and her baby supposedly both died in childbirth. But what happened to the baby's body? And who is the father of the baby — Mal, who married the Crawford sister Quirke desired for himself. or someone else? And what really happened to Christine Falls? The more questions he asks, the more bad things happen, including the murder of a woman who knows too much and a crippling beating of Quirke himself. More tragic consequences follow Quirke to Boston when he goes there on family business. It turns out that is where the answers to his questions lie. This is a solid mystery debut, never losing its grip on the reader despite its deliberate pace.
In his decision to write a straightforward, no-nonsense thriller about transatlantic baby-smuggling and the Catholic Church, John Banville, a veritable emperor of baroque prose, has not so much taken a vow of poverty as put in a sly bid to extend and reinforce his stylistic dominion. ... Those familiar with Banville will have expected nothing less; the neophyte, however, who picks up this racy little number anticipating nothing more than a night of brisk casual thrills may soon be surprised to find himself in the grips of a literary passion he had not gambled on. AwardsDistinctions
Fiction.
Literature.
Mystery.
Historical Fiction.
HTML: 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 corpseâ??and concealing the cause of death. No library descriptions found. |
LibraryThing Early Reviewers AlumBenjamin Black's book Christine Falls was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
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