3.0
April in Spain
ByPublisher Description
*NATIONAL BESTSELLER*
Booker Prize winner John Banville returns with a dark and evocative new mystery set on the Spanish coast
Don't disturb the dead…
On the idyllic coast of San Sebastian, Spain, Dublin pathologist Quirke is struggling to relax, despite the beaches, cafés and the company of his disarmingly lovely wife. When he glimpses a familiar face in the twilight at Las Acadas bar, it's hard at first to tell whether his imagination is just running away with him.
Because this young woman can't be April Latimer. She was murdered by her brother, years ago—the conclusion to an unspeakable scandal that shook one of Ireland's foremost political dynasties.
Unable to ignore his instincts, Quirke makes a call back home to Ireland and soon Detective St. John Strafford is dispatched to Spain. But he's not the only one en route. A relentless hit man is on the hunt for his latest prey, and the next victim might be Quirke himself.
Sumptous, propulsive and utterly transporting, April in Spain is the work of a master writer at the top of his game.
Don't miss John Banville's next novel, The Lock-up!
Other riveting mysteries from John Banville:
Booker Prize winner John Banville returns with a dark and evocative new mystery set on the Spanish coast
Don't disturb the dead…
On the idyllic coast of San Sebastian, Spain, Dublin pathologist Quirke is struggling to relax, despite the beaches, cafés and the company of his disarmingly lovely wife. When he glimpses a familiar face in the twilight at Las Acadas bar, it's hard at first to tell whether his imagination is just running away with him.
Because this young woman can't be April Latimer. She was murdered by her brother, years ago—the conclusion to an unspeakable scandal that shook one of Ireland's foremost political dynasties.
Unable to ignore his instincts, Quirke makes a call back home to Ireland and soon Detective St. John Strafford is dispatched to Spain. But he's not the only one en route. A relentless hit man is on the hunt for his latest prey, and the next victim might be Quirke himself.
Sumptous, propulsive and utterly transporting, April in Spain is the work of a master writer at the top of his game.
Don't miss John Banville's next novel, The Lock-up!
Other riveting mysteries from John Banville:
- Snow
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities74 Reviews
3.0
T207
Created about 1 month agoShare
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Munehito Moro
Created about 2 months agoShare
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Daniel Bader
Created 3 months agoShare
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“A decent mystery beautifully written. Like all Banville novels, it’s the writing, and the characters it creates, the milieu it sets, far more than the plot, that keeps you turning the page. This is not the propulsive plot-driven thriller that you’d expect from the genre, and honestly that’s fine with me. Just spending time with these rich, damaged, mid-century malcontents is worth the price of admission alone.
April in Spain is both the sequel to “Snow”, which introduced the stuffy, Protestant Detective Strafford, and the latest (8th) in the Quirke series, the first in which they feature together. It’s helpful to know the backstory here, about a dead woman named April Latimer and her extremely dysfunctional family, but enough of it is filled in through dialogue and flashbacks as to be sufficient if coming in new. This is also the first Quirke book written under Banville’s actual name and not his Benjamin Black nom-de-plume, so I suspect, like me, it’ll be many people’s introduction to his less literary fiction.
But this is still very cerebral stuff. The book mostly jumps between San Sebastián, Spain, and Dublin in the mid-1950s, where Quirke finds himself on vacation with his too-good-to-be-true wife Evelyn, an Austrian Holocaust survivor whose upbeat outlook on life belies the historical trauma that she refuses to let bog her down. There’s also a delicious assassin out for blood and plenty of sensuous descriptions of vistas.
The book, however, definitely lacks anything in the way of a proper mystery, and the plot, such as it is, ends too abruptly to feel fulfilling. Worth reading for the sparking prose alone, though.”
Mark Warren
Created 3 months agoShare
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“Can’t seem to get enough of Banville’s Quirke and Stratford. Very engaging, unique take on detective/pathologist duo.”Sophiene
Created 3 months agoShare
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About John Banville
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 novels written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. 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.
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