Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein.
Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Banville has written several novels featuring Quirke, mostly under the pen name Benjamin Black this one is a worthy addition to that series.Īnother worthy thriller from the Irish master novelist.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. The prose and dialogue are stellar, as one would expect from the Booker Prize–winning Banville, and the ending comes as a complete shock. He was like phosphorus, that burns in air.” This novel succeeds on the considerable strength of its characters, especially the quicksilver Quirke and the quiet Strafford. Quirke turned to alcohol after his wife’s murder, and his personality has become unpredictable: “Quirke’s mere presence in a room had an incendiary effect. Throughout the novel, the difficult relationship between Strafford and Quirke is explored Quirke’s wife was shot to death in Spain some time before, and Strafford killed her killer.
(The idea that Rosa, who was Jewish, would befriend Germans so soon after World War II strikes many involved in the case as odd.) The plot thickens as the investigators discover that a friend of Rosa’s from Tel Aviv has been killed by a hit-and-run driver. The two men’s investigation leads them to a German family that Rosa knew they hear rumors that Rosa was romantically involved with one member, Frank. Quirke, a pathologist who doubts that the case is a suicide-he noticed marks on Rosa’s mouth, which he thinks points to her having been gagged and anesthetized before being put in the running car. John Strafford is assigned to the case, as is Dr.
The body of the 27-year-old woman, a history scholar in 1950s Dublin, is discovered behind the wheel of a car, with its hood up and most of its windows closed, a hose connecting the exhaust pipe to a gap in the driver’s side window. When Rosa Jacobs is found dead in a garage, it initially looks like an open-and-shut case. A detective and a pathologist in 1950s Ireland suspect an apparent suicide is actually a murder.
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