Although adopted from an orphanage by Judge Garrett Griffin and raised as one of the judge's own, Quirke was the judge's favored son.

It's long past midnight when Quirke, a hard-drinking Dublin pathologist, abandons the upstairs office party for the solitude of his downstairs morgue office only to find his brother, Malachy Griffin, seated at his desk. Mal, a prominent obstetrician, is making changes he shouldn't be making to a file that shouldn't be in his possession.

When, the following day, the body of Christine Falls goes missing, what might have remained an ordinary death suddenly becomes a death under suspicious circumstances, and Quirke takes it upon himself to investigate.

Quirke's quest for the truth leads him deep into a conspiracy that goes to the core of Dublin's high Catholic society. Ignoring subtle warnings to back off, he pays a high price when the warnings turn violent. When the trail of misdeeds and corruption leads him across the Atlantic to Boston, Quirke renews ties with his dead wife's family, and gets reacquainted with his own dark past.

Set in the 1950s, Christine Falls is billed as the first of a series featuring Quirke, a Dublin hospital pathologist, as the protagonist. Let's hope that it's not the last. Tom Adair, writing in The Scotsman, called Christine Falls "A one-sitting read, an all-night enticement." Adair is probably right. Although it took me three successive nights to get through the book, I confess to saying—numerous times—"just one more chapter before I turn out the light."

Writing as Benjamin Black, acclaimed novelist John Banville makes a credible leap across genres, from writing literary fiction to writing literary crime fiction. Winner of numerous writing awards, he captured the 2005 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sea. Born in 1945, in Wexford, Ireland, he now lives in Dublin.

Review by Phil Hanson, for FSB Associates