Staff Reviews
A young woman is found dead in her car in a closed garage. Pathologist Dr. Quirke isn't convinced that it is a case of suicide. Detective Inspector St. John Strafford agrees that Rosa Jacobs doesn't seem the type to take her own life. She was a vocal activist for women's rights and her pro-abortion commitment was not a popular one in Ireland. The possibility of a murder forces the two men to work together. The relationship is rocky because Quirke still blames Strafford for the death of his wife in Spain a year earlier. The investigation leads them to a fabulously wealthy German expatriate with a shadowy past, whose contributions to the Catholic Church warrants the intervention of the bishop in Dublin. This delightfully twisty novel manages to offer a compelling mystery told with a brilliantly polished literary flair. It is a worthy successor to Snow and April in Spain and that is high praise indeed.
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Alden Graves
Description
Booker Prize winner and "Irish master" (New Yorker) John Banville
's most ambitious crime novel yet brings two detectives together to solve a globe-spanning mystery In 1950s Dublin, Rosa Jacobs, a young history scholar, is found dead in her car. Renowned pathologist Dr. Quirke and DI St. John Strafford begin to investigate the death as a murder, but it's the victim's older sister Molly, an established journalist, who discovers a lead that could crack open the case.
One of Rosa's friends, it turns out, is from a powerful German family that arrived in Ireland under mysterious circumstances shortly after World War II. But as Quirke and Strafford close in, their personal lives may put the case--and everyone involved--in peril, including Quirke's own daughter.
Spanning the mountaintops of Italy, the front lines of World War II Bavaria, the gritty streets of Dublin and other unexpected locales,
The Lock-Up is an ambitious and arresting mystery by one of the world's most celebrated authors.
