Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Dallas Public Library | CD - BLACK | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... McMinnville Public Library | Black, B. | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Two years have passed since the events of the bestselling "Christine""""Falls," and much has changed for Quirke, the irascible, formerly hard-drinking Dublin pathologist. His beloved Sarah is dead, the Judge lies in a convent hospital paralyzed by a devastating stroke, and Phoebe, Quirke's long-denied daughter, has grown increasingly withdrawn and isolated.
With much to regret from his last inquisitive foray, Quirke ought to know better than to let his curiosity get the best of him. Yet when an almost-forgotten acquaintance comes to him about his beautiful young wife's apparent suicide, Quirke's "old itch to cut into the quick of things, to delve into the dark of what was hidden" is roused again. As he begins to probe further into the shadowy circumstances of Deirdre Hunt's death, he discovers many things that might better have remained hidden, as well as grave danger to those he loves. Haunting, masterfully written, and utterly mesmerizing in its nuance, The Silver Swan fully lives up to the promise of "Christine Falls" and firmly establishes Benjamin Black (a.k.a. John Banville) among the greatest of crime writers.
Summary
In this sequel to Christine Falls, Dublin pathologist Quirke, still reeling from his last case, notices something amiss while performing an autopsy on an old friend's wife. Although she apparently committed suicide, Quirke's examination points to the contrary.
Author Notes
Benjamin Black is the pen name of acclaimed author John Banville, who was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. His novels have won numerous awards, most recently the Man Booker prize in 2005 for The Sea . He lives in Dublin.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this stunning follow-up to 2007's Christine Falls, Black (pseudonym of Booker Prize-winner John Banville) spins a complex tale of murder and deception in 1950s Ireland. Pathologist Garret Quirke, surprised by a visit from a college acquaintance, Billy Hunt, is even more surprised when Billy begs Quirke not to perform an autopsy on his wife, Deirdre, whose naked body was recently retrieved from Dublin Bay. Though everything points to suicide, Quirke knows something's amiss and begins to retrace Deirdre's steps. Black expertly balances Quirke's investigation with chapters detailing Deidre's past, from her marriage to Billy to her shady business deal with Leslie White, an enigmatic Englishman who knew Deidre as Laura Swan, the proprietress of their joint venture, a beauty salon called the Silver Swan. As Quirke digs deeper, he discovers a web of lies and blackmail that threatens to envelop even his own estranged daughter, Phoebe. Laconic, stubborn Quirke makes an appealing hero as the pieces of this unsettling crime come together in a shocking conclusion. Author tour. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Black, a pseudonym for Booker Prize winner John Banville, continues his exceptionally nuanced crime series featuring a soul-sick Irish pathologist named Quirke that began with Christine Falls (2007). Black sets his darkly poetic Dublin mysteries in the classic noir postwar era, revitalizes traditional tropes, and assembles provocative and labyrinthine plots. Quirke, large and brooding, is a newly reformed alcoholic damned awkward in conversation and perversely destructive in his efforts to do good. As in the first novel, the suspicious death of a young woman launches the drama: a long out-of-touch childhood acquaintance asks Quirke not to perform an autopsy on Deidre, his drowned wife. Naturally, Quirke is all the more vigilant in his investigation, and once again his fractured family is drawn into the bloody mess, especially his angry, austere daughter, Phoebe. Black loops back to tell Deidre's harrowing tale of poverty; sexual abuse; brief venture as the proprietor of the Silver Swan, a beauty salon; and sordid, if erotic, affair with silver-tongued con man Leslie White. Black keenly threshes misogyny, class and racial conflicts, and Irish fatefulness in this tense, engrossing tale of passion, crimes, and chaos shot through with lightning wit and radiant compassion.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A new mystery from Benjamin Black (aka John Banville) tracks the last days of a woman who turns up dead in Dublin Bay. GENRE fiction's scruffy reputation in the world of letters has always been a badge of honor. Still, there's a tendency in the ranks to get all twittery whenever a "literary" author adopts a catchy pseudonym and has a crack at a genre novel - especially if he's a Man Booker Prize winner like John Banville, whose first mystery, "Christine Falls," written under the pen name Benjamin Black, won a nomination from the Mystery Writers of America for the 2008 Edgar Award for Best Novel. It's easy to see why this community would take pride in a colleague who expresses his ideas in such shapely prose and striking imagery. But what allure does a niche field hold for an author who has already made his bones in the wider world - and why should we be surprised by it? "Crime fiction is a good way of addressing the question of evil," according to Banville, who has now written a sequel, "The Silver Swan," to the story he told in "Christine Falls." But the study of evil is surely also the provenance of other sorts of literature, so there must be more to it than that. Something to do, perhaps, with the format of the crime novel, a solid structure built on the implicit promise that evil, once detected, can be contained before it destroys the society that let it take root. Such a job calls for an honorable protagonist - someone just like Quirke, professionally implausible as a "hotshot pathologist" at the Hospital of the Holy Family in 1950s Dublin (where he hardly ever shows up for work), but superbly suited to the role of sleuth by virtue of his "incurable curiosity." That unquiet and inquisitive mind, along with a sense of responsibility to the dead people he meets on his autopsy table, got Quirke beaten half to death in "Christine Falls." The same misadventure also caused serious rifts in his close and complicated relationships with members of the socially prominent family into which he was adopted as a workhouse orphan - something it really helps to know before picking up "The Silver Swan." "There was another version of him," Black says of his attractively flawed hero, "a personality within a personality, malcontent, vindictive, ever ready to provoke." Given to masochistic guilt and remorse for those sins (real and imagined) he committed in "Christine Falls," Quirke tries to perform a kind of social penance in "The Silver Swan" by indulging a former college classmate's wish to avoid having an autopsy performed on his beautiful young wife, who committed suicide by plunging naked off a pier into Dublin Bay. That kindness is quickly retracted, however, after Quirke examines the body and suspects she's been murdered. If Quirke's brooding Irish soul and independent code of ethics make him exactly the kind of troubled hero the genre loves, Black has given himself plot headaches by meddling with some techniques of the trade he mastered so brilliantly in "Christine Falls." Departing from the convention of allowing the reader to follow the story from the detective's perspective, Black runs Quirke's private investigation on a parallel track with the victim's own story, told in intimate flashbacks. Despite the depth and sensitivity of the storytelling, the device distances us from Quirke's investigations and diminishes the analytic intelligence of his viewpoint - which is, after all, an essential element in the appeal of the detective story. In this melancholy second narrative, Deirdre Hunt emerges as a clever and ambitious girl, desperate to become her own woman. Her imagination awakened by a bogus spiritual healer, she claws her way out of the slums and adopts a professional name, Laura Swan, when she opens a fashionable beauty shop with a flashy business partner. But that louche bounder, Leslie White, is such a phony, with his studied airs and transparent line of seduction, that his astounding success with all manner and class of women - Quirke's rebellious daughter, Phoebe, among them - reduces these otherwise interesting characters to idiots. Black also seems trapped by the complicated family saga and intricate personal relationships that were integral to the plot of "Christine Falls." What's a writer to do with all these fascinating people, few of them strictly necessary in this new novel, but some too deliciously wicked to kill off? His answer - to cram as many of them as he can into Deirdre's story - makes for such contrived situations and coincidental events that the characters themselves feel compelled to protest. Make no mistake, Black is a grand writer with a seductive style, and the dark, repressive world he makes of postwar Dublin - when there's no shortage of religious brothers to run the workhouses or nuns to operate the convent hospitals - goes a long way to explain why everyone in this morally claustrophobic world is so sex-mad. But the conventions of crime fiction provide structural security for any exploratory attack on the subject of evil (or sin, as Black's characters are more apt to define it), and failing to take full advantage of that freedom is like traveling all the way to Ireland and neglecting to visit either a church or a pub. Marilyn Stasio writes the Crime column for the Book Review.
Library Journal Review
Following the success of Christine Falls, Black, the pen name of Booker Prize-winning author John Banville (The Sea), returns with a second atmospheric crime novel once again starring Quirke, a 1950s Dublin pathologist and unlikely hero, a deeply curious man with the insight to know "something in him yearned for the darkness." Like the first book, this novel opens with the death of a young woman, the owner of a seemingly successful beauty salon called the Silver Swan. Her body is found in the river, her clothing neatly folded at the edge of the water. The distraught husband, not wanting his beautiful wife's body harmed, asks Quirke (a former classmate of the husband) to bypass the standard postmortem. Upon examining it, Quirke quickly notices a puncture mark visible on the dead woman's arm. And so Quirke's descent into darkness begins yet again. Black/Banville is a master of atmosphere; the fear and dread associated with hidden desires and deeds fairly leap off the page. Highly recommended for all public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/07.]-Andrea Y. Griffith, Loma Linda Univ. Libs., CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.