Christine Falls: Summary and book reviews of Christine Falls by Benjamin Black, plus links to an excerpt from Christine Falls and a biography of Benjamin Black.
Christine Falls A Novel
by Benjamin Black
Hardcover: Mar 2007,
352 pages.
Paperback: Feb 2008,
352 pages.
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, among them 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.
BOOK REVIEWS
BookBrowse
Black's 1950s Dublin is a moody, atmospheric place where carthorses mingle with cars, the pubs are fugged up with smoke, girls take tea in hats, and the attitudes of society are dominated by the rigid dogma of the Catholic Church, but times are changing, as epitomized by Phoebe, the restless daughter of Mal and Sarah who is determined to make her own way and marry who she wishes, even if he is a Protestant. Full Review (871 words).
Media Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
A good story, and gorgeous writing.
Publishers Weekly
Though Black makes an occasional American cultural blooper, he keeps divulging surprises to the last page so that the reader is simultaneously shocked and satisfied.
Booklist - Thomas Gaughan
Nearly all the characters are painstakingly detailed and developed--even though they're likely to be morally mysterious. But readers' advisors should take note: crime-fiction fans who favor garden-variety mysteries may find this complex and deeply ruminative novel more than they bargained for.
Library Journal
While Christine Falls reads like an accessible, classic detective story, its confident manner and psychological portrait of a conflicted, broken narrator set it apart from mass-market fare.
New York Times - Janet Maslin
Christine Falls rolls forward with haunting, sultry exoticism ... toward the best kind of denouement under these circumstances: a half-inconclusive one.
The Guardian - Michael Dibdin
It would be absurd to suggest that Banville writing as Black is better than Banville writing as Banville, but in a different and yet fascinatingly similar way he is every bit as good, and deserves to win a new, broader readership with this fine book.
Alan Furst Christine Falls is a triumph, of classical crime fiction, finely, carefully made, not a single false move or wrong word—why oh why don’t they write books like this anymore.
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A beguiling, imaginative, inspiring story about the bigness of being alive as an individual, as a member of a tribe, and as a participant in history, exploring how we use storytelling to survive and shape our own truths.
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(871 words).
Alan Furst
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