very well-written and gripping ( )

Won on LibraryThing's Early Reviewers and I'm so glad I did! This is the sequel to Christine Falls and finds Quirke still working as a pathologist a few years after the events of the previous mystery. Things have changed a bit, though Quirke is mostly the man he was. Then one day, he receives a call from a man he knew in college. Seems that Billy Hunt's wife has died, possibly suicide. Billy is horrified at the thought of her body being cut up and requests Quirke not to do an autopsy. Quirke tells the man that by law there must be one in the case of suspicious deaths, but Billy is so distraught that Quirke tells him he won't perform one. But when he performs an external examination of Deirdre Hunt's body, he finds something that causes him to have to perform an autopsy. And once again, he finds himself drawn into a mystery surrounding a young woman's death.

Just as good as the first. I hope Banville keeps writing these Benjamin Black mysteries. ( )

Black (Banville) has a special way of resolving a mystery plot while completely deflating any attendant sense of satisfaction. The prose is too good to be considered truly noir or hard boiled, but the lead character -- Dublin pathologist Quirke -- is certainly taciturn and utterly opaque. ( )

The Silver Swan takes place in 1950s Dublin, about two years after the conclusion of Christine Falls. Quirke, six months sober, is asked by a school acquaintance, Billy Hunt, not to do an autopsy on his dead wife, Deirdre. The request piques Quirke's interest, and he starts asking questions.

As in Christine Falls, Black weaves together multiple narrative strands, allowing the reader to learn things that Quirke does not. This time, we have flashbacks to Deirdre’s final months. Overall, the use of shifting perspectives works. It does, however, make for an entirely different kind of detective novel, and at times Quirke’s investigation seems almost beside the point. At the end of the book, I actually had to wonder whether he found out much of anything at all.

The story here is much darker than in Christine Falls. It touches on people’s deepest, darkest desires, and how others can manipulate those desires to their benefit. It asks why we do things that we find repulsive. Where do we draw the line? And how do others lead us to step beyond the boundaries? And can things ever go back to the way they were?

Black’s descriptions of people’s feelings, of their mannerisms, of the setting, of everything are lush and evocative, and reader Timothy Dalton handles the prose very well. At times, I found the descriptions a bit too lavish, but this really is a minor problem, and not one that would keep me from reading more Quirke books. I still want to see where Black is going to take these characters.

See my complete review at my blog. ( )

http://tinyurl.com/q7dc68

This is the problem when you put your book reviewing off and all of a sudden you have three, almost four, books to review in a row. Let's see... I picked this book on LibraryThing Early Reviewers because it was a foreign-published book originally and I've had more luck with those lately. That said, it was not in the same league as the latest one I chose that way.

I'm sorta phasing out on murder mysteries, unless they're absolute classics or I adore the writing. Reason being, it's just not that hard to figure out whodunnit. I mean, the author usually has a limited cast of characters and one of those has to be the one who did the deed or else how would the story work?

Maybe I'm "eh" on this book because it's set in such a depressing place and time. Actually, speaking of time, I had the darndest time figuring out whether this was set in the present or sometime around WWII. Descriptions of clothing, transportation, pubs-- it was confusing, and I don't think it was just me being a dolt.

So, it's nothing awful, but it's just not particularly exciting. Certainly not what the reviewer on the cover is frothing about. ( )