Christine Falls, John Banville
Christine Falls, John Banville
List: $26.99 | Sale: $18.89
Club: $13.49

Christine Falls
A Novel

Author: John Banville

Series: Quirke #1

Narrator: Timothy Dalton

Unabridged: 9 hr 33 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/06/2007


Synopsis

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.

About John Banville

JOHN BANVILLE was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of numerous novels, including The Sea, which won the 2005 Booker Prize, and the DI Quirke mysteries. In 2011 he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, in 2013 he was awarded the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Achievement in Irish Literature, and in 2014 he won the Prince of Asturias Award, Spain’s most important literary prize. He lives in Dublin.

About Timothy Dalton

Timothy Dalton is perhaps best known for his critically-acclaimed incarnation of James Bond in The Living Daylights and License to Kill. Dalton is a longtime reader of thrillers written by Booker Prize winner John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, including Christine Falls, which garnered an AudioFile Earphones Award. AudioFile magazine described Dalton’s reading of The Silver Swan, also written by Benjamin Black, as "so good it will make listeners giddy with delight… As the heavy-drinking Irish pathologist Quirke, Dalton offers a pitch-perfect Irish brogue. It’s all thrilling, honest, and raw." A classically trained Shakespearean actor, Dalton has appeared in films including The Tourist and in television miniseries including Scarlett (in which he played Rhett Butler), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and in countless Shakespearean films and plays. He is also the voice of Mr. Pricklepants, a character in the animated film Toy Story 3.  


Reviews

Goodreads review by Bill on February 29, 2020

This, the first in the series of detective novels written pseudonymously by John Banville, is set in 1950's Dublin and features the melancholy pathologist Quirke, who, though scarred by failure and a widower's grief, still possesses a spark of intellectual curiosity and a few glowing embers of compa......more

Goodreads review by Ian on August 03, 2015

The End Justifies the Mean I originally bought this as a remainder and left it unread for several years, suspecting it might be a vain or indulgent experiment in crime genre fiction by one of my favourite authors, John Banville. Instead, it’s a masterful and easy to read pathological, if not necessari......more

Goodreads review by Mona on June 26, 2015

Suprisingly Brilliant Noir I didn't have high expectations for this book. But I was taken by surprise. It was much better than I expected. Benjamin Black a.k.a. John Banville has written a suprisingly good noir crime novel, albeit a very dark one. Quirke (whose first name we never discover) is a patholo......more

Goodreads review by Dave on August 01, 2023

One of my favorite books of 2022. Great (2006) book, brilliantly crafted. PS: Just last night began watching the terrific tv series based on this mystery series featuring Gabriel Byrne as Quirke. John Banville, like Graham Greene, made a distinction I have never liked between his “literary” novels an......more


Quotes

Christine Falls is a triumph of classical crime fiction, finely, carefully made, not a single false move or wrong word--why don't they write books like this anymore?” —Alan Furst

“Contemporary fiction gets no better than this... Banville's books teem with life and humor.” —Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review on The Untouchable

“John Banville is the heir to Nabokov.” —The Sunday Telegraph on The Sea

“A major work of fiction in which every suave moment calmly detonates to show the murderous gleam within.” —Don DeLillo on The Book of Evidence


Awards

  • Audible.com Best of the Year
  • Edgar Allan Poe Award Nominee
  • Audible.com 100 Audible Essentials
  • Publishers Weekly Listen Up Awards: Best in Category
  • Macavity Award - Nominee