A Death in Summer - (Quirke) by John Banville & Benjamin Black (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A powerful man's suspicious suicide has Dublin on a boil in the fourth Quirke volume, named one of the Chicago Tribune's Best Reads of the Year

On a sweltering summer afternoon, newspaper tycoon Richard Jewell--known to his many enemies as Diamond Dick--is discovered with his head blown off by a shotgun blast. But is it suicide or murder? For help with the investigation, Detective Inspector Hackett calls in his old friend Quirke, who has an unusual level of access to Dublin's elite.

Jewell's coolly elegant French wife, Françoise, seems less than shocked by her husband's death. But Dannie, Jewell's high-strung sister, is devastated, and Quirke is surprised to learn that in her grief she has turned to an unexpected friend: David Sinclair, Quirke's ambitious assistant in the pathology lab at the Hospital of the Holy Family. To complicate things further, an unlikely romance has begun to blossom between Sinclair and Quirke's fractious daughter Phoebe. As a record heat wave envelops the city and the secrets underlying Diamond Dick's empire come to light, Quirke and Hackett find themselves caught up in a dark maze of intrigue and violence that threatens to end in disaster.

Tightly plotted and gorgeously written, A Death in Summer is John Banville at his thrilling best.

Review Quotes

Praise for A Death in Summer

"Banville's books about the dour Irish pathologist named Quirke have effortless flair, with their period-piece cinematic ambience and their sultry romance. [These] books are much more like Alan Furst's elegant, doom-infused World War II spy books than like standard crime tales."
--The New York Times

"Banville's narratives are loaded with poetic devices."
--The New Yorker

"A Death in Summer is a beach read for the brainy."
--Los Angeles Times

"With Quirke, [Banville] has made a fascinating addition to the ranks of the defective detective in books that combine respectful reading of the genre with brightly original writing."
--The Guardian

"Just a few pages of the latest outing (featuring his pathologist protagonist, Quirke) demonstrate just what a stylist he is; a writer whose use of English can create an almost sensuous frisson."
--The Independent

"Banville has improved with every book, and the latest, A Death in Summer, is his best yet....He knows how to weave a mystery."
--The Daily Beast

"Banville's latest [Quirke] novel is another complex character study disguised as a plot-driven work of genre fiction."
--The Kansas City Star

Praise for John Banville

"Ireland's greatest living novelist...a literary polymath."
--The New York Times

"A grand writer with a seductive style."
--The New York Times Book Review

"The Irish master."
--The New Yorker

"One of the best novelists in English."
--The Guardian

"One of the most imaginative literary novelists writing in the English language today."
--The Washington Post

"[Banville's] books are like baroque cathedrals."
--The Paris Review

"Prodigiously gifted. He cannot write an unpolished phrase."
--The Independent

"One periodically rereads a [Banville] sentence just to marvel at its beauty."
--USA Today

"Banville is a master at capturing the most fleeting memory or excruciating twinge of self-awareness with riveting accuracy."
--People

About the Author

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.