Vengeance Audiobook By John Banville, Benjamin Black cover art

Vengeance

A Novel

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Quirke finds himself at the center of a deadly intergenerational feud in the latest novel from Booker Prize-winning "literary polymath" (The New York Times) John Banville

Two men go sailing off the coast of Ireland. Only one comes back, claiming the other shot himself. But Detective Inspector Hackett and his friend Quirke aren’t so sure…

The dead man is the patriarch of the powerful Delahaye family; the survivor is the scion of the Clancy family, their longtime rivals turned resentful business partners. As Quirke and Hackett investigate the death, they become embroiled in this multigenerational entanglement, encountering a host of characters at the heart of the mystery: Mona, Delahaye’s beautiful, vicious young widow, his enigmatic identical twin sons, and Jack Clancy, his resentful, downtrodden, womanizing partner. But when a second, even more shocking death occurs, it becomes clear that terrible secrets undergird the families’ world—secrets which Quirke will need to uncover if he wants to prevent more deaths.

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt & Co.

 Crime Fiction World Literature Mystery Suspense Crime Revenge Thriller & Suspense Noir Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Historical

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For the last few years I've been making my way though Benjamin Black's Quirke novels. I love John Banville's Dublin-noir side project. I think he did this to write lowbrow crime novels, but you can't take the artist out of the man. I'm a fan of genre novels, and Banville can keep up with the best Noir/Crime novelists. His books are psychological and character driven, like a playful Patricia Highsmith.

John Banville's Irish Noir

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I really like this series. The only thing that would have made it better would be to have Gabriel Byrne narrating it!

Brilliant Mystery

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Benjamin Black is, of course, the name under which the high-literary writer John Banville indulges his love of genre, specifically of noir procedurals. He is a skillful and evocative descriptive writer: one beautiful image succeeds another, page after page, until an entire shimmering edifice of hardened men, weak sisters, femmes fatales, familial grudges and dogged investigators is conjured -- and then collapses, bloodlessly, in a silly plot. This book has it all: identical twins, crazy aunts, a variant on the locked room mystery. Everyone in it smokes and drinks like crazy. Perhaps the author suspected that the whole enterprise was more than a bit musty and therefore set it in the Dublin of the 1960s. It would have felt musty then, too.

Coincidentally, I followed this book with Tana French's "In The Woods", another procedural set in Dublin. French's novel is also skillfully written, but is kicking with life and clear-eyed observation: her hardened detective is not a romantic figure, for instance, and amid the general dark mayhem lurks a keen sense of humor. Everyone still smokes and drinks like crazy, though.

Noir-ish

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The line below comes from another reviewer for another book, however, I thought it was so true about Vengeance
'This book goes on and on with small details about things that just does not matter'.

I just couldn't finish it.

Not his best

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Both Quirke and Phoebe are written to be infuriatingly passive, and slow-witted. Phoebe allows herself to be drugged, and Quirke allows Mona and the twins to smart off to him repeatedly. A truly hopeless drunk as Quirke is depicted to be would have clenched her by the throat, smacked her across the face a few times and thrown her into a heap on the floor. “Watch the way you speak to me, you filthy whore.” Then, later Phoebe is drugged, Quirke goes in and accepts a drink! I hate stupid weak protagonists!

Infuriating

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