Book cover of Christine Falls

Book description

In the debut crime novel from the Booker-winning author, a Dublin pathologist follows the corpse of a mysterious woman into the heart of
a conspiracy among the city's high Catholic society

It's not the dead that seem strange to Quirke. It's the living. One night, after a few drinks at…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Christine Falls as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Christine Falls is the first in a series of crime novels by Booker-winning author John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black. The novels are set in Ireland in the 1950s and they feature Quirke, a misanthropic, hard-drinking, depressive pathologist. All the novels in the series are master classes in how to manage setting, character, and language. All of them are great reads. I’ve chosen Christine Falls because it’s the first in the series. It starts with a presumed suicide and widens to feature corruption and betrayal by family, church, and state.

From Natalie's list on crime featuring flawed detectives.

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