Christine Falls

I grabbed the audio format of this book after chatting with a library staffer at the central branch of the Dublin Public Library. Chosen as their community read, I thought it would be a nice listen when I returned home from my trip.

Right away I loved the dark atmosphere which only got better from Timothy Dalton's narration. Eerie, a bit sinister and set in 1950's Dublin, the story centres around Dr. Garret Quirke, a grumpy morgue pathologist who catches his brother-in-law Malachy meddling with the files of a recently deceased woman, Christine Falls. This pulls Quirke (and the reader) into a mystery of the young woman's death.

Initially, I loved Quirke's character and how the story began to unfold. This was atmospheric with a capital A! But this is the sloooowest of slow burn reads (definitely not my jam) and when you add in a lot of page time devoted to Quirke's backstory, things become convoluted with a lot of characters and how they're all connected to each other. Honestly, Quirke's 'quirks' (namely his curmudgeonly demeanor and regular inebriation) felt like they overshadowed what I had hoped to be, a competent sleuth. Perhaps his skills will be seen in future books?

Final Thoughts: Loved the 1950's Dublin setting and the eerie vibe but wanted more mystery and less family/character dysfunction.

My Rating: 3 stars

Author: John Banville (aka Benjamin Black)

Genre: Suspense, Historical

Series: Quirke 1

Type and Source: eAudio from public library

Narrator: Timothy Dalton

Run Time: 

Publisher: Macmillan Audio

First Published: Jan 1, 2006

Read: 

Book Description from GoodReads: It's not the dead that seem strange to Quirke. It's the living. One night, after a few drinks at an office party, Quirke shuffles down into the morgue where he works and finds his brother-in-law, Malachy, altering a file he has no business even reading. Odd enough in itself to find Malachy there, but the next morning, when the haze has lifted, it looks an awful lot like his brother-in-law, the esteemed doctor, was in fact tampering with a corpse, and concealing the cause of death.

It turns out the body belonged to a young woman named Christine Falls. And as Quirke reluctantly presses on toward the true facts behind her death, he comes up against some insidious and very well-guarded secrets of Dublin's high Catholic society, including members of his own family.

Set in Dublin and Boston in the 1950s, the first novel in the Quirke series brings all the vividness and psychological insight of Booker Prize-winner John Banville's fiction to a thrilling, atmospheric crime story. Quirke is a fascinating and subtly drawn hero, Christine Falls is a classic tale of suspense, and Benjamin Black's debut marks him as a true master of the form.