The Lock-Up
“Strikingly beautiful prose…Banville’s complete mastery of mood wins the day.”
Booklist
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice of the Week
Booker Prize winner 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 Detective Inspector 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.
Praise