I’m going to get this series up to date this year.  I started it back in 2014 or so, and dropped it because having read about 8 of them I was used to John Bancroft’s beautifully rendered novels.  So I felt I owed it to Bancroft to read his pseudonym, but the style didn’t transfer to the mystery genre very well,  not imo.  

Vengeance 
by Benjamin Black 
Read by John Keating 9h 50m
Rating:   
(#5 in Quirke series) 

Time went by and a few years later I read others, both Bancroft and Black. (See below for the chronology of the books.)  It was reading Snow a couple years ago which introduced a character named Sgt St. James Stafford and his partner Quirke, I got hooked with that one.  

Earlier this year I finally read Quirk #4, A Death in April, which was really quite good.  And I read some other Bancroft novels, The Black-Eyed Blonde, and Mrs Osmond. He was okay.

The series takes place in 1950s Dublin where the Catholics and Protestants live peacefully, for the most part, side by side, but don’t really mesh. And because it’s the 1950s, there’s a lot of cigarette smoking and so on.  

Anyway,  Victor Delahaye apparently shoots himself while out sailing with the son of his business partner.  The police are called and Quirk conducts the post-mortem. Then not too long afterwards Jack Clancy, the business partner, drowns as the result of a boat leak. It gets tangled with two families overly involved with each other due to their business.  These novels aren’t thrillers – they’re mysteries. So kick back and enjoy.  

 *****************

Benjamin Black’s Quirke Mysteries in Chronological Order

Christine Falls 2007
The Silver Swan 2008
Elegy for April 2010
A Death in Summer 2012
Vengeance 2012
Holy Orders 2013
Snow written as John Banville 2020 (with Detective Inspector St. John Strafford) April in Spain written as John Banville 2021
The Lock-Up written as John Banville 2023

*******************