“Set in the 1950s, the action in this novel takes place in Ireland and later in Boston. The main character is Quirke, a pathologist. Quirke is a hard-drinking gloomy character, haunted by the death of his wife years earlier. As a boy, he was taken out of an orphanage by the head of a very powerful family, the Griffins in Dublin. As the novel opens, it's Christmas and he's just coming to his office in the hospital's morgue, where he sees his brother-in-law, Malachy Griffin, an obstetrician,...”

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