A Death in Summer

"[Benjamin Black's] books about the dour Irish pathologist named Quirke have effortless flair, with their period-piece cinematic ambience and their sultry romance. The Black books are much more like Alan Furst's elegant, doom-infused World War II spy books than like standard crime tales."--Janet Maslin, "The New York Times""Black's drab Dublin streets are full of perplexing figures, archetypes, as if the characters were stalking through some Jungian map of the unconscious: weakened, dying fathers, good mothers, bad mothers, twins, 'dark doubles, ' ghosts surging up from the past... His narratives are loaded with poetic devices."--"The New Yorker"
"Black has improved with every book, and the latest, "A Death in Summer", is his best yet... [Black] knows how to create a first-rate sleuth--the ungainly, middle-aged Dublin pathologist Quirke, a man who can never seem to keep his nose out of trouble."--Malcolm Jones, "The Daily Beast""The author of the Booker Prize-winning "The Sea", Banville is a literary artist, whereas Black is a craftsman who churns out page-turning crime tales... Banville's latest Benjamin Black novel is another complex character study disguised as a plot-driven work of genre fiction."--"The Kansas City Star""["A Death in Summer"] is an elegant novel, well-paced with dramatic twists, disturbing surprises and richly drawn characters whose actions and motives have a tangible psychological depth.Mr. Black/Banville is well in form here... It can be either plunged into without any need to reference the previous three or else taken as a welcome new installment of a sequential quartet by one of Ireland's leading contemporary novelists."--"New York Journal of Books"