April in Spain

May 1, 2021

Dublin pathologist Quirke is vacationing on the Spanish coast with his wife when he's spooked by the sight of someone in a bar made dusky by twilight. The woman he spots appears to be April Latimer, murdered years ago by her brother in a crime that rocked one of Ireland's most prominent political families to its roots, and a puzzled Quirke soon has Det. St John Strafford winging down from Ireland to investigate. With a 150,000-copy first printing.

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August 2, 2021
Banville’s slow-moving eighth crime thriller featuring Irish pathologist Quirke (after 2015’s Even the Dead) finds Quirke and his wife, Evelyn, vacationing in San Sebastián, Spain. When the couple forget to buy an oyster-opening tool, Quirke tries to use a nail scissors instead and accidentally wounds himself badly enough that Evelyn insists they go to a hospital. There, he’s initially examined by Angela Lawless, an Irish physician who looks familiar, but who never returns to the exam room, leaving another doctor to tend to the injury. Her appearance and her initials lead Quirke to suspect that she’s actually April Latimer, a woman believed to be dead. April’s brother, who was sexually involved with his sibling, had confessed to killing her before taking his own life. Quirke shares his suspicions with his daughter, Phoebe, who had been April’s friend, and Phoebe travels to Spain to see for herself. Meanwhile, a psychotic hit man emotionally attached to his gun lurks in the background. The melodramatic ending doesn’t compensate for a story line too slight for the book’s length. Banville has been much better. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency.

Starred review from October 15, 2021
Banville returns to his series hero, Dublin pathologist Quirke, in this moody thriller set in the Basque village of Donostia, where the morose but sublimely sardonic Quirke is vacationing (an alien concept for him) with his newish wife, Evelyn, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor. After stabbing himself with an oyster knife, Quirke is treated by a doctor who looks oddly familiar. Could she be April Latimer, who disappeared years earlier in the wake of a scandal and was presumed dead? (That story was told in Elegy for April, 2010, written, like all the other Quirke novels before this one, under the pseudonym Benjamin Black.) Quirke summons his daughter, Phoebe, hoping she can confirm if the doctor is really April; the Irish police are interested, too, and Phoebe is accompanied by St. John Strafford from Snow (2020), another character with a closet full of unresolved issues. As this plot develops under the springtime sun (Phoebe, who shares her father's gloom, sees spring as the season of ""unassuageable agitations""), a parallel story unfolds featuring a troubled, Graham Greene-like hitman, Terry Tice, who is charged with dispatching April once and for all. This leisurely paced tale crackles with the kinetic energy of an approaching thunderstorm as Banville brilliantly contrasts the blue skies of Spain with the wine-dark seas roiling inside his characters' heads.

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Starred review from August 15, 2021
A literary period piece featuring colorful characters and a mysterious crime. In postwar Ireland, "Terry Tice liked killing people," and he offs his gay friend Percy on a whim. Meanwhile, in Donostia in the Basque region of Spain, a semihappy couple named Quirke and Evelyn are visiting for an April holiday. He's an Irish pathologist--hero of earlier mysteries Banville published under the name Benjamin Black--and she's an Austrian psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust. Quirke is the perfect name for the husband, who "could never say the word 'love' without flinching." And he "made love deftly, in an exploratory sort of way, like a doctor searching for the source of an obscure malady." Evelyn loves to tease him: "You love to be miserable," she says. "It's your version of being happy." Meanwhile, a young woman named April Latimer is dead, murdered by her brother, but her body has never been found. April is the catalyst who eventually brings the storylines together--but well before that, readers will savor the author's imagery and playful language. After doing in his pal, Terry finds Percy's photos of nude "fellows with enormous how's-your-fathers." In a restaurant, Quirke and Evelyn's "waiter looked like a superannuated toreador." Earlier, the odors in a fish stall made Quirke think of sex. They buy oysters, an innocent act that lands Quirke in the hospital, where Doctor Angela Lawless haunts his thoughts but he doesn't know why. Meanwhile, Doctor Cruz demands to know why the couple is really in Spain. Are they poking into the April Latimer business? The bulk of the story focuses on the two vacationers, but Tice may have the last word on whether they can ever return to the Emerald Isle. The plot is good, but the prose--ah, the prose: A woman watches fat raindrops fall, and she "imagined them to be tiny ballerinas making super-quick curtseys and then dropping through little trapdoors hidden in the stage." And who can't smile at a woman's observation that a fellow may be "inclined to the leeward side of Cape Perineum"? Great fun from a masterful writer.

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