Benjamin Black

April Latimer has vanished. A junior doctor at a local hospital, she is something of a local scandal in the conservative and highly patriarchal society of 1950s Dublin. Her friend, Phoebe Griffin, suspects the worst. Phoebe seeks out Quirke, her brilliant but erratic father, for help. Sober again after intensive treatment for alcoholism, Quirke uses his knowledge of the darker byways of the city to investigate April's disappearance.

This is the second Quirke novel from Man Booker prize-winning John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black. Time has moved on for Quirke, the world-weary Dublin pathologist first encountered in "Christine Falls". It is the middle of the 1950s, that low, dishonorable decade; a woman he loved has died, a man whom he once admired is dying, while the daughter he for so long denied is still finding it hard to accept him as her father. When Billy Hunt, an acquaintance...

When the body of his daughter's friend is brought to his autopsy table, Quirke is plunged into a world of corruption that takes him to the darkest corners of the Irish Church and State.--

"Perhaps Quirke has been down among the dead too long. Lately the Irish pathologist has suffered hallucinations and blackouts, and he fears the cause is a brain tumor. A specialist diagnoses an old head injury caused by a savage beating; all that's needed, the doctor declares, is an extended rest. But Quirke, ever intent on finding his place among the living, is not about to retire. One night during a June heat wave, a car crashes into a tree in central...