The Silver Swan (Quirke Series #2)

Quirke returns in another spellbinding crime novel, in which a young woman’s dubious suicide sets off a new string of hazards and deceptions.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Benjamin Black is John Banville reincarnated as a crime writer, and his coming into being is surely a dimension of the author's obsession with the disunity of personal identity. As Black, however, Banville has jettisoned the heavy bales of philosophical ballast that weighed down -- or deepened, if you prefer -- the novels written under his own name. That's good news to the lightweights among us who admire Banville's potent visual and olfactory imagery, pungent style, and historical mischief making but who also find that a little philosophical rumination, not to say scab picking, goes a very long way.

Benjamin Black is the pen name of acclaimed author John Banville, who was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. His novels have won numerous awards, most recently the Man Booker prize in 2005 for The Sea. He lives in Dublin.