St. John Strafford

The incomparable Booker Prize winner’s next great crime novel—the story of a family whose secrets resurface when a parish priest is found murdered in their ancestral home Detective Inspector St. John Strafford has been summoned to County Wexford to investigate a murder. A parish priest has been found dead in Ballyglass House, the family seat of the aristocratic, secretive Osborne family. The year is 1957 and the Catholic Church rules Ireland with an iron fist. Strafford—flinty, visibly Protestant and determined to identify the murderer—faces obstruction at every turn, from the heavily accumulating snow to the culture of silence in the tight-knit community he begins to investigate. As he delves further, he learns the Osbornes are not at all what they seem. And when his own deputy goes missing, Strafford must work to unravel the ever-expanding mystery before the community’s secrets, like the snowfall itself, threaten to obliterate everything.

Don't disturb the dead… On the idyllic coast of San Sebastian, Spain, Dublin pathologist Quirke is struggling to relax, despite the beaches, cafés and the company of his disarmingly lovely wife. When he glimpses a familiar face in the twilight at Las Acadas bar, it's hard at first to tell whether his imagination is just running away with him. Because this young woman can't be April Latimer. She was murdered by her brother, years ago—the conclusion to an unspeakable scandal that shook one of Ireland's foremost political dynasties. Unable to ignore his instincts, Quirke makes a call back home to Ireland and soon Detective St. John Strafford is dispatched to Spain. But he's not the only one en route. A relentless hit man is on the hunt for his latest prey, and the next victim might be Quirke himself. Sumptous, propulsive and utterly transporting, April in Spain is the work of a master writer at the top of his game.

John Banville's most ambitious crime novel yet brings two detectives together to solve a globe-spanning mystery In 1950s Dublin, Rosa Jacobs, a young history scholar, is found dead in her car. Renowned pathologist Dr. Quirke and DI St. John Strafford begin to investigate the death as a murder, but it's the victim's older sister Molly, an established journalist, who discovers a lead that could crack open the case. One of Rosa's friends, it turns out, is from a powerful German family that arrived in Ireland under mysterious circumstances shortly after World War II. But as Quirke and Strafford close in, their personal lives may put the case-and everyone involved-in peril, including Quirke's own daughter. Spanning the mountaintops of Italy, the front lines of World War II Bavaria, the gritty streets of Dublin and other unexpected locales, “The Lock-Up” is an ambitious and arresting mystery by one of the world's most celebrated authors.

From the national bestselling author of “Snow” comes a richly atmospheric new mystery about a woman's sudden disappearance in a small coastal town in Ireland, where nothing is as it seems. "He had seen drowned people. A sight not to be forgotten." 1950s, rural Ireland. A loner comes across a mysteriously empty car in a field. Knowing he shouldn't approach but unable to hold back, he soon finds himself embroiled in a troubling missing person case, as a husband claims his wife may have thrown herself into the sea. Called in from Dublin to investigate is Detective Inspector Strafford, who soon turns to his old ally, the flawed but brilliant pathologist Quirke, a man he is linked to in increasingly complicated ways. But as the case unfolds, events from the past resurface that may have life-altering ramifications for all involved. At once a searing mystery and a profound meditation on the hidden worlds we all inhabit, “The Drowned” is the next great Strafford and Quirke novel from a beloved writer at the top of his game.