The Lemur
A Novel

Somewhere around the end of the first chapter I started feeling like this book was going to be a disappointment. And that feeling never really went away. I wanted to like it, but I never cared about any of the characters and the plot twists were more like plot leaps, having little connection to what......more

Oh, John, John, John. Stop dressing up as Benjamin. This is the last, although it's also my first, straw. Not all hard-boiled fiction is 'easy', you smug little man. You make it look like a parody. Your characters say things that the embarrassed John Banville is saying in your head (e.g. 'You speak......more

John Banville—the writer behind the writer Benjamin Black—used to thrill me with his surprising turns of phrase, peculiar situations and exposition of plot via the medium of a strong narrator’s speculative musing. Now I’ve come to expect these, indeed look forward to them; the thrill now comes from......more

The hero of The Lemur is John Glass, a one-time investigative journalist who has grown soft through his marriage into money. His wife, whom he married for love before the love wore off, is the daughter of William ‘Big Bill’ Mulholland, an Irish-American electronics billionaire. Big Bill has commissi......more