April in Spain/John Banville
John Banville is an Irish writer who has won the Booker Prize for The Sea and written murder mystery novels under the pseudonym Benjamin Black.
This novel has a double narrator – psychopath hitman Terry Tice and retired Dublin pathologist John Quirke – and a double setting – Dublin and San Sebastián in the Basque Country.
Both converge in the denouement.
John Quirke, on holiday with his new wife psycho-analyst Evelyn, believes he has encountered the best friend of his daughter Phoebe who was apparently murdered by her brother Oscar back in Dublin.
The plot takes in the corrupt and ruthless uncle of April, a politician called Bill Latimer, and is scathing of the cruelty and abuse of Irish orphanages.
It is not just fine lyrical prose that separates Banville from yer average crime writer but the many layers of the plot.
