Christine Falls

First things first: Benjamin Black is a pseudonym of 2005 Booker winner John Banville. Christine Falls is the first in a planned series of thrillers by Banville, starring Irish coroner Quirke, a lonely, drunken, mammoth of a man who seeks redemption through his sleuthing.

The book begins with two story lines that eventually converge: A nurse transports a baby from Ireland to America under suspicious circumstances, and Quirke finds his brother-in-law Mal—a doctor at the same hospital—in his office, falsifying a young woman’s death record. From there, an intricate plot involving family betrayals, international black-market babies and Catholic complacency emerges. The plot is well conceived and plays out in slow motion with occasional surprises, so let’s not put too much stock in the word thriller. Readers of crime fiction will open Christine Falls and find a finely drawn family drama full of ill-fated love, brotherly betrayal and pre-DNA–testing paternal surprises.

These are Banville’s trademarks: beautiful writing about death and loss, and the tricks played by memory when it’s tied to tragedy. All of that is here, plus baby trafficking. So why the pseudonym? The pen name is nothing more than a marketing angle, a banner thrown up that reads, look! respected “literary” author scaling back to write “genre!” It’s a sentiment we find as annoying as this book was enjoyable.—Jonathan Messinger