Elegy for April: A Novel

by Benjamin Black Narrated by Timothy Dalton

Overview

Quirke-the hard-drinking, insatiably curious Dublin pathologist-is back, and he's determined to find his daughter's best friend, a well-connected young doctor

April Latimer has vanished. A junior doctor at a local hospital, she is something of a scandal in the conservative and highly patriarchal society of 1950s Dublin. Though her family is one of the most respected in the city, she is known for being independent-minded; her taste in men, for instance, is decidedly unconventional.

Now April has disappeared, and her friend Phoebe Griffin suspects the worst. Frantic, Phoebe seeks out Quirke, her brilliant but erratic father, and asks him for help. Sober again after intensive treatment for alcoholism, Quirke enlists his old sparring partner, Detective Inspector Hackett, in the search for the missing young woman. In their separate ways the two men follow April's trail through some of the darker byways of the city to uncover crucial information on her whereabouts. And as Quirke becomes deeply involved in April's murky story, he encounters complicated and ugly truths about family savagery, Catholic ruthlessness, and race hatred.

Both an absorbing crime novel and a brilliant portrait of the difficult and relentless love between a father and his daughter, this is Benjamin Black at his sparkling best.

Editorial Reviews

Janet Maslin

The Quirke books are so savvy, stylish and unencumbered by literary ambition that they deliver a lot of guilty pleasure. They're clever but uncomplicated…Set in the 1950s, when a fashionable woman may show up in a mink coat…the Quirke books mirror the small-mindedness of their time…and place. Elegy for April [is] the best and most assured of the lot…
—The New York Times

Kirkus Reviews

Alcoholic Dublin pathologist Quirke emerges from rehab in the 1950s to an urgent request from his daughter Phoebe to find an even more troubled daughter. No one's seen April Latimer for 12 days. In the case of her family, that's hardly surprising, since they'd parted ways long ago. But the friends she'd made as a junior doctor at the Hospital of the Holy Family-a small group that includes actress Isabel Galloway, Nigerian medical student Patrick Ojukwu and Phoebe Griffin-are worried. So Phoebe asks her father, whom she's known for most of her life as her uncle, for help. Though Quirke succeeds in interesting his friend Inspector Hackett in the case, he doesn't succeed in much else, largely because April's older brother Oscar and their widowed mother Celia simply assume the family's black sheep has gone off with still another man, and her uncle Bill, Ireland's Minister of Health, is so much more obsessed with damage control than with learning the truth that he uses every channel to block Quirke's inquiries. The search settles into a well-worn rut-more hand-wringing from April's friends, more denials from her family-that gives Quirke's quest a tedium as authentic as that of a police procedural. What sets it apart is the uncanny ability of Black (The Lemur, 2008) to bring his characters alive with flashes of piercing insight, whether Quirke's dealing with his stepmother-in-law or learning to drive. This tale of two families-April's clearly dysfunctional, Quirke's nearly so-is the most conventional of the pathologist's three cases to date (The Silver Swan, 2008, etc.).

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169426724
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	04/13/2010
Series:	Quirke Series , #3
Edition description:	Unabridged

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