A Death in Summer, John Banville
A Death in Summer, John Banville
List: $26.99 | Sale: $18.89
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A Death in Summer
A Novel

Author: John Banville, Benjamin Black

Series: Quirke #4

Narrator: John Keating

Unabridged: 9 hr 47 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/05/2011


Synopsis

One of The Chicago Tribune's Best Reads of 2011

One of Dublin's most powerful men meets a violent end— and an acknowledged master of crime fiction delivers his most gripping novel yet

On a sweltering summer afternoon, newspaper tycoon Richard Jewell—known to his many enemies as Diamond Dick—is discovered with his head blown off by a shotgun blast. But is it suicide or murder? For help with the investigation, Detective Inspector Hackett calls in his old friend Quirke, who has unusual access to Dublin's elite.

Jewell's coolly elegant French wife, Françoise, seems less than shocked by her husband's death. But Dannie, Jewell's high-strung sister, is devastated, and Quirke is surprised to learn that in her grief she has turned to an unexpected friend: David Sinclair, Quirke's ambitious assistant in the pathology lab at the Hospital of the Holy Family. Further, Sinclair has been seeing Quirke's fractious daughter Phoebe, and an unlikely romance is blossoming between the two. As a record heat wave envelops the city and the secret deals underpinning Diamond Dick's empire begin to be revealed, Quirke and Hackett find themselves caught up in a dark web of intrigue and violence that threatens to end in disaster.

Tightly plotted and gorgeously written, A Death in Summer proves to the brilliant but sometimes reckless Quirke that in a city where old money and the right bloodlines rule, he is by no means safe from mortal danger.

About John Banville

JOHN BANVILLE was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of numerous novels, including The Sea, which won the 2005 Booker Prize, and the DI Quirke mysteries. In 2011 he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, in 2013 he was awarded the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Achievement in Irish Literature, and in 2014 he won the Prince of Asturias Award, Spain’s most important literary prize. He lives in Dublin.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Dave on July 25, 2022

A Death in Summer, the fourth entry in Benjamin Black’s Dr. Quirke mystery series, sounds almost like the title of a title of a sixties French film I might have seen in the seventies--atmospheric, vaguely romantic/existentialist, noir, and it’s set in an unusually hot (sultry) summer with noirishly......more

Goodreads review by Jenny on February 17, 2019

A Death in Summer is book four in the Quirke series by Benjamin Black. One Sunday afternoon Inspector Hackett received a called that changed his plans for the day. On arrival at the crime scene, Inspector Hackett gain the information that the state pathologist is sick, and they are sending Doctor Qu......more

Goodreads review by Nancy on July 26, 2012

If you haven't read the three books prior to this one, click here to find out what you've missed. It was a drowsy day in summer, a perfect day for a death: "When word got about that Richard Jewell had been found with the greater part of his head blown off and clutching a shotgun in his bloodless ha......more

Goodreads review by Sid on January 04, 2016

This is a consciously "literary" crime novel. How you respond to it will depend upon whether you like the sort of heightened language employed by Benjamin Black (the Man Booker winner John Banville writing under a well-publicised pseudonym). I do like it and so I did enjoy the book, although I thoug......more

Goodreads review by John Hood on July 30, 2011

Nothing says Summer like a good murder story. Maybe it’s the cold-bloodedness of it all that helps to beat the heat; perhaps it’s simply that sweat is easier to endure when it’s shared with someone who’s sweating death. Whatever it is, there are few things more refreshing when the temperature rises......more


Quotes

“Narrator John Keating keeps a firm hold on a variety of characters and accents – from the not-so-grieving widow's French purr to the too-involved Detective Quirke's hard-edged brogue. Supporting characters are distinctly developed, and Keating's masterful style keeps the action moving forward.” —AudioFile Magazine

“[Keating's] reading of A DEATH IN SUMMER is a winner. Keating is a natural to bring Dublin based Quirke to life.” —Beauty by the Books

“Keating has a gift for thinking through the monologues of some of the minor characters…” —Reviewing the Evidence

“Reader Keating, a television actor (Boardwalk Empire, Nurse Jackie) and member of the theatrical Irish Rep Company, compliments the protagonist's every mood. He narrates the objectively told novel with an Emerald Isle lilt that keeps us mindful of the locale but is subtle enough that is does not interfere with the serious, sometimes somber atmosphere created by the prose.” —Mystery Scene

“[Benjamin Black's] books about the dour Irish pathologist named Quirke have effortless flair, with their period-piece cinematic ambience and their sultry romance. The Black books are much more like Alan Furst's elegant, doom-infused World War II spy books than like standard crime tales.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“Black's drab Dublin streets are full of perplexing figures, archetypes, as if the characters were stalking through some Jungian map of the unconscious: weakened, dying fathers, good mothers, bad mothers, twins, ‘dark doubles,' ghosts surging up from the past… His narratives are loaded with poetic devices.” —The New Yorker

“Black has improved with every book, and the latest, A Death in Summer, is his best yet… [Black] knows how to create a first-rate sleuth--the ungainly, middle-aged Dublin pathologist Quirke, a man who can never seem to keep his nose out of trouble.” —Malcolm Jones, The Daily Beast

“The author of the Booker Prize-winning The Sea, Banville is a literary artist, whereas Black is a craftsman who churns out page-turning crime tales… Banville's latest Benjamin Black novel is another complex character study disguised as a plot-driven work of genre fiction.” —The Kansas City Star

“[A Death in Summer] is an elegant novel, well-paced with dramatic twists, disturbing surprises and richly drawn characters whose actions and motives have a tangible psychological depth. Mr. Black/Banville is well in form here... It can be either plunged into without any need to reference the previous three or else taken as a welcome new installment of a sequential quartet by one of Ireland's leading contemporary novelists.” —New York Journal of Books