"It was not the dead that seemed to Quirke uncanny but the living."

Quirke is a haunted, hard-drinking pathologist stumbling through the brooding gloom of 1950s Dublin. It is a society of secrets and meanness, dominated by a rigid hierarchy--as Quirke is reminded of when he catches his well-connected brother-in-law faking morgue records.

The cause of this tampering is the corpse of a mysterious woman: Christine Falls. But who is she, and how did she die? Quirke's hunt for the answers to these questions will draw him into a transatlantic conspiracy, and pit him against some of Dublin's most powerful forces, from the Catholic Church to members of his own family.

Originally published under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, John Banville's debut thriller reveals a new side of "Ireland's greatest living novelist" (The New York Times).