Quirke was a character who passed from the novels of John Banville to television across the UK. An overwhelming triumph whose secret is respect for the unique setting that this author, under the pseudonym of Benjamin Black, has been offering its readers for years.
Every crime novel needs a tightrope walker character who walks in anxiety between good and evil. Quirke knows the most sordid side of society, but he knows that it is nothing more than a reflection of the highest instances, where famous and glorious citizens descend from time to time to hell to spread at their pleasure all the evil that governs their souls. .
In the case of book Quirke's Shadows, all part of an apparent suicide behind the wheel of a car. An official jaded with life seems to have decided to get out of the way. But there is always something wrongly closed in every homicide, as if God intervened at every moment to avenge the affront of the man who kills another man, surpassing the power of the Creator to give and take life.
Perhaps I have become too rimbonbante ... but it is that also religion, or those who govern it, has here its starring role between the amoral and the macabre.
Quirke believes he is moving towards the truth, until that truth begins to splash around him, to the depths of his being. That is when everything explodes, and the resolution of the case can become the gravest discovery.
You can buy the book Quirke's Shadows, Benjamin Black's latest novel, here:
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