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Learn moreIt'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.
Benjamin Black is the pen name of the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville. Black's books include The Black-Eyed Blonde, Christine Falls, The Silver Swan, among others. He lives in Dublin.
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
“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