Christine Falls

A Novel

By: Benjamin Black

Narrated by: Timothy Dalton

Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins

Publisher's summary

It's not the dead that seem strange to Quirke. It's the living. One night, after a few drinks at an office party, Quirke shuffles down into the morgue where he works and finds his brother-in-law, Malachy, altering a file he has no business even reading. Odd enough in itself to find Malachy there, but the next morning, when the haze has lifted, it looks an awful lot like his brother-in-law, the esteemed doctor, was in fact tampering with a corpse—and concealing the cause of death.

It turns out the body belonged to a young woman named Christine Falls. And as Quirke reluctantly presses on toward the true facts behind her death, he comes up against some insidious—and very well-guarded—secrets of Dublin's high Catholic society, among them members of his own family.

Set in Dublin and Boston in the 1950s, the first novel in the Quirke series brings all the vividness and psychological insight of Booker Prize winner John Banville's fiction to a thrilling, atmospheric crime story. Quirke is a fascinating and subtly drawn hero, Christine Falls is a classic tale of suspense, and Benjamin Black's debut marks him as a true master of the form.

©2006 Benjamin Black (P)2006 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers LLC

Critic reviews

“Christine Falls is a triumph of classical crime fiction, finely, carefully made, not a single false move or wrong word--why don't they write books like this anymore?” —Alan Furst

yummy

timothy dalton was a sensation as a brooding, handsome heathcliff when he was younger. now, his rich, richer, richest vocal tones serve up an intriguing mystery as tantalizingly as the creamy aroma of freshly brewed coffee with your favorite dessert liquor .....delicious combination.

Dalton and Black: perfection for the ear and mind

Dalton is an excellent reader who imbues this book with a texture of nuance, atmosphere and moral imperatives. Worth a thoughtful listener's time and involvement.

Ponderous and plodding first book in series

Not sure what made this book so unenjoyable for me. My guess is that it might have needed a lot more editing. Anyhow, after getting halfway through Part 1, I decided to skip the rest--which means I am not going to find out what happened to Christine Falls. :-(

The tone of the part I listened to (most of Part 1) I found to be a relentless downer, partly because of the depressed tone of the reader, which happened to match too closely to the depression of the main character telling the story. That might have come to be resolved if the characters became real enough to care about them and their relationships to each other, and the conspiracy/crime/mystery solving story didn't drag on without any sign it would come together.

Possibly this is going to become a good series and the main character. I just couldn't get through this first book, though.

Fortunately it was a $6.95 special.

Whose Baby Belongs to Who

This fast-paced mystery novel of rich and poor families in Boston and Ireland in the 1950s involved with an orphanage and the Catholic Church, felt like a return to detective novels of the 1950s. The author's descriptions of people was so exquisite that I knew exactly what each person looked like.

Magical

Timothy Dalton's voice made me try this book and it also delivered the goods. Now I am on the look for more books by Benjamin Black!

A novel by any other name....

Black, Banville... no matter. He's a master. The man can't write an uninteresting sentence. This story sparkles as does the prose.

Excellent

Such a great, complicated but intriguing story. Well read. Really well read. I highly recommend this book.

Excellent writing, brilliant reading

What about Timothy Dalton’s performance did you like?

Can you fall in love with sound of a voice? The timbre and tone of Dalton's voice is a thing of beauty, flowing effortlessly through the required Irish (tinged with his own Welsh) brogue, he creates one of the finest audiobook readings I've ever heard - powerful, nuanced and deeply felt. His Shakespearian roots (yes, long before James Bond) are obvious in the range and power of his skills, which would surely do justice to any work of the Bard's. Gorgeous man with a gorgeous gift. I wish he'd recorded more than just these three audiobooks.

Any additional comments?

Almost forgot to say that the material is superior, with fully realized characters - described in an incredibly rich world of language that only Irish authors seem to own. Could not stop listening. On to the next in the series. Can't wait!

Mystery without apologies

I'm not really a big fan of mysteries, but there are a few authors I'll read: Kate Wilhelm for the characters, Ellis Peters for the backgrounds, Tony Hillerman for the textures of Navajo life. Now I can add Benjamin Black to the list. Unsurprisingly (in his other identity of John Banville, he is a Booker Prize-winning literary novelist), Black writes fine novels that happen also to be mysteries.

Some level of mystery is an element of most literary novels. How will the protagonist resolve this problem? But Quirk, Black's hero in this series, is a pathologist, the man who does the post-mortem on patients and on his own sins, as he sees it. He is, in fact, no more a sinner than the rest of us, but being an Irish Catholic in the 1950's, he feels it more strongly. And it is his character that keeps us enthralled from book to book.

The mystery here is more than sufficiently complex, but it is used as a vehicle for a portrait of a world, of the power elite of a place and time that was no more or less corrupt than any other. Even the villains are human, and get to speak for themselves.

Actually, Timothy Dalton speaks for them, and there are few readers who are better than he. Don't think of him as James Bond, but as, say, the young king of France in The Lion in Winter, and you'll get an idea of just how fine an edge he brings to these books.

Interesting Enough

I'm glad I got this on sale, and I'm glad I finished it. It was interesting. However, there was nothing remarkable. In my opinion, it was slow and dull. It was slightly predictable. The conclusion felt flat, although it left you with some thoughts to ponder.
The narrator's voice was wonderful.
I struggled to follow along with scene changes, though. That was frustrating. There were not adequate gaps. I was constantly confused and had to rewind to figure out that the had scene changed and now we were hearing about a different character.