It was Reading Matters that took me to this book. The author is the much admired Irish writer John Banville, writing mysteries under the pen name Benjamin Black. I have read one of John Banville’s books.
The mystery solving characters of his books are a medical pathologist named Dr. Quirke and a policeman Detective Inspector Hackett. In this one Dr. Quirke begins an affair with the wife of the murdered man shortly after the murder, in an unorthodox move for a police procedural. His questioning of suspects seems a bit random and was not always coordinated with Detective Inspector Hackett. The book is set in 1950 Dublin; antisemitism is in evidence.
Another character (perhaps appearing only in this book) is Dr. Quirke’s assistant pathologist, David Sinclair. In a choice uncomfortable for all three of them, Dr. Quirke arranged a dinner with his daughter Phoebe, David Sinclair, and himself. It was made especially so by the fact that Phoebe was brought up by her mother, had no contact with Quirke until she was grown, and seemed quite distant to him.
And yet it was the connection between David Sinclair and Phoebe that brought the most notable moment for me. Sinclair describes his reaction to Phoebe:
Phoebe was a far stranger creature than he had at first imagined. He sensed a darkness in her. He even pictured it, a circular gleaming black pool as at the bottom of a deep well, perfectly still except for now and then when the surface shivered for a moment in response to some far quake or crack and sent off a flash of cold light.
That description told me so much about both Phoebe and Sinclair.
The murdered man was a powerful newspaper tycoon and not connected to his very French wife Françoise. She seemed chameleon-like; her various actions seemed unconnected to each other.
Benjamin Black, A Death in Summer, Henry Holt, 2011, 308 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available in the public library.