A Death in Summer: 4 (Quirke) - Softcover

Black, Benjamin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250002508 ISBN 13: 9781250002501

Publisher: Picador USA, 2012

Synopsis

One of The Chicago Tribune's Best Reads of 2011.

One of Dublin's most powerful men meets a violent end--and an acknowledged master of crime fiction delivers his most gripping novel yet.

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 unusual 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. Further, Sinclair has been seeing Quirke's fractious daughter Phoebe, and an unlikely romance is blossoming between the two. As a record heat wave envelops the city and the secret deals underpinning Diamond Dick's empire begin to be revealed, Quirke and Hackett find themselves caught up in a dark web of intrigue and violence that threatens to end in disaster.

Tightly plotted and gorgeously written, A Death in Summer proves to the brilliant but sometimes reckless Quirke that in a city where old money and the right bloodlines rule, he is by no means safe from mortal danger.

About this title

Review

The literary novelist John Banville (who writes his crime fiction under the alliterative moniker ‘Benjamin Black’) has built up a faithful following for his idiosyncratic historical outings (set in the 1950s) featuring his pathologist anti-hero Quirke. It’s not difficult to see why. Just a couple of chapters of the new novel, A Death in Summer, is an object lesson in Banville/Black’s highly individual skills; he is a writer whose grasp of period and locale is second to none.

The brutal death of newspaper tycoon Richard Jewell at his country property (the shotgun that killed him clutched in his dead hands) is not the suicide it initially appeared to be, and has propelled Quirke into the search for a ruthless murderer. The dead man’s enemies are legion, and the immediate suspect is one of his most powerful rivals, but as Quirke, his assistant Sinclair and his colleague Inspector Hackett realise, there is a complex mystery behind the death. And just what is the involvement of the dead man’s mysterious wife, the seductive Françoise d’Aubigny?

As we are reminded here, Quirke himself is the author’s ace-in-the-hole: badly coordinated, prone to drink and constantly dealing with his own demons, he’s a highly individual protagonist in the over-crowded crime fiction field. Similarly, the Dublin which is the setting here is conjured with the customary skill, while the details of life in fifties Ireland are presented with acute precision, both these elements making up for the over-familiar plot revelations. A Death in Summer is as engrossing a piece of writing as anything in the current historical crime field; readers will be happy to visit vintage Dublin in the company of the badly-dressed but brilliant Quirke. --Barry Forshaw

Review

"[Benjamin Black's] books about the dour Irish pathologist named Quirke have effortless flair, with their period-piece cinematic ambience and their sultry romance. The Black books are much more like Alan Furst's elegant, doom-infused World War II spy books than like standard crime tales." --Janet Maslin, The New York Times

"Black's drab Dublin streets are full of perplexing figures, archetypes, as if the characters were stalking through some Jungian map of the unconscious: weakened, dying fathers, good mothers, bad mothers, twins, 'dark doubles, ' ghosts surging up from the past... His narratives are loaded with poetic devices." --The New Yorker

"Black has improved with every book, and the latest, A Death in Summer, is his best yet... [Black] knows how to create a first-rate sleuth--the ungainly, middle-aged Dublin pathologist Quirke, a man who can never seem to keep his nose out of trouble." --Malcolm Jones, The Daily Beast

"The author of the Booker Prize-winning The Sea, Banville is a literary artist, whereas Black is a craftsman who churns out page-turning crime tales... Banville's latest Benjamin Black novel is another complex character study disguised as a plot-driven work of genre fiction." --The Kansas City Star

"[A Death in Summer] is an elegant novel, well-paced with dramatic twists, disturbing surprises and richly drawn characters whose actions and motives have a tangible psychological depth.

Mr. Black/Banville is well in form here... It can be either plunged into without any need to reference the previous three or else taken as a welcome new installment of a sequential quartet by one of Ireland's leading contemporary novelists." --New York Journal of Books

Edition details

• Publisher: Picador USA
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1250002508
• ISBN 13: 9781250002501
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288