![]() As he begins looking into the circumstances of the girl's death in childbirth he is, unfortunately, drawn deeper into his own background - having been taken in as a child by Malachy's powerful father - and a conspiracy involving the Catholic Church and the city's political elites. Returning to his morgue somewhat drunk one night, he finds his foster brother, Malachy, fiddling with the paperwork on a dead young girl, Christine Falls. The sleuth here is Dublin pathologist Garret Quirke. Alas, at least in this first entry that's not the case. After all, he'd shown himself to be an able imitator and the police procedural would give him an opportunity to expand his horizons, with an investigation touching upon multiple layers of society and presumably a varied cast of characters. ![]() ![]() But when word came that he was turning his hand to a series of mysteries, written under a quite public pseudonym for some reason, it seemed likely he could redeem himself. Descending into willful obscurity is certain to win literary prizes but pretty much designed to thwart readership. When critics opined that his latter few were - perhaps inevitably for a serious Irish author - influenced by Joyce, Beckett, Proust and company, it only made him all the easier to ignore. His facility with the genre was impressive enough but the form is so dark and claustrophobic that the exercise couldn't help but wear thin. ![]() ![]() I read and admired a couple of John Banville's earlier gothic novels, but admiration isn't necessarily enjoyment and I'd felt no great compunction to read the successors. ![]()
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