The novel reads like a turning point in the series, for those who have read its predecessors, with resolution saved for...
The sixth in a series of Irish mystery novels resolves its ostensible mystery, but deeper mysteries remain.
The latest novel from Black (Vengeance, 2012, etc.) featuring the pathologist Quirke is not the place to start for those new to the series. Its plot relies heavily on characters from previous novels and developments that transpired within those, and it doesn’t sufficiently elaborate on Quirke’s relationships with his daughter, his girlfriend or even with the corpse whose discovery propels the narrative. Yet plot has always been less important than character, atmosphere and style within these novels from the alter ego of celebrated literary author John Banville (Ancient Light, 2012, etc.), who has typically been less concerned than most mystery writers and readers with whodunit than with mortality, identity, Ireland and other themes shared with his literary fiction. As a pathologist rather than an investigator, Quirke mulls the possibility that he had initially been drawn to his profession “in hope of penetrating nearer to the heart of the mystery,” but he’s since realized that “[e]very day he dealt with death and yet knew nothing about it, nothing.” While mortality permeates the novel, its real mystery is the mind of Quirke, one he no longer trusts as he suffers panic attacks and disorientation while trying to come to terms with a murder that puts the Catholic Church at odds with an exploitive, sensationalistic press. Oddly, neither the murder victim nor the mastermind behind the crime exerts much of a presence in the novel, which focuses more on the abuses Quirke suffered as a young Catholic and on the way the investigation forces him to revisit places in his memory that are as uncomfortable as they were formative. “[E]verything Quirke did, so he felt, was predetermined by laws laid down he did not know when, or how, or by what agency,” writes Black. “He was a mystery to himself, now more than ever.” For Black, the mystery of the human condition remains impenetrable.
The novel reads like a turning point in the series, for those who have read its predecessors, with resolution saved for subsequent volumes.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9440-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
PROFILES
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
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