The world of Benjamin Black (aka Booker Prize-winning author John Banville) is a bleak and cynical one.

So it's rather unsurprising that "The Silver Swan" is a bleak and cynical murder mystery, full of secrets, dark streets and loneliness. The second book about the ironically-named ex-alcoholic pathologist Quirke is a pretty depressing affair, but the tangled relationships do make it a bit harder to identify just who dunnit.

An old classmate of Quirke's comes to him for help -- his wife Dierdre was just found dead at the bottom of a sea cliff, and he's begging for a little understanding and help. But when Quirke does a postmortem, he spies a needle mark on Dierdre's arm -- and though he's unsure of whether it was murder, suicide or an accident, he begins poking into the life she was living before she died.

To make matters worse, his perpetually estranged, chilly daughter Phoebe has become involved with Leslie White, a seductively foppish hairdresser who was also Dierdre's partner in business -- and, Quirke finds, the bedroom. His investigations lead him to a smarmy "spiritual healer" and White's ex-wife, who are pieces in a murderous puzzle...

Do not expect the sunny quirky Ireland of "Waking Ned Devine," or the quaintly modern land of certain chick-lit novels. The Ireland of "Silver Swan" is a determinedly bleak place -- dark, grimy, sunless, where people drink and have sex to forget the miserable emptiness of their lives. Every loved one dies, leaving the remaining people counting down the days until they themselves die.

But while Black's prose starts off rather stilted and spare, he hits his stride a few chapters in -- full of nuanced details and atmospheric little descriptions ("...until at last there should be nothing of her left but a hair's-breadth outline sketched from a few black and silver lines"). Everything takes on the cynical edge of a reminiscence, so that even a shocking crime seems weary and painful.

As for the mystery itself, it's told half in Quirke's meandering inquiries -- he sort of pokes and prods around here and there, unearthing clues. But we get more of a glimpse into the past than he does, via chapters from Dierdre's point of view -- we see the men who enthralled her, used her, and may have murdered her. Pretty creepy stuff.

And the characters, like the prose, are sad outlines. Quirke, as always, is anything but quirky. He's still haunted by a past of lost loves and alcoholism, but he pays more attention to his present problems -- his estrangement from his daughter, and his love life -- than he did before. Phoebe is less striking, mainly because she's so determined to look and act a dried-up spinster.

"The Silver Swan" is a bleak desert of motives and maybe-murders, painted in dark words by a very talented author. But if you feel depressed, then don't touch this book with a ten foot pole.

It's been a long time since a book made me miss my stop on my morning commute but that's just what The Silver Swan did to me last week. An engrossing, beautiful book, once the exposition of material laid out in Christine Falls is gotten through.

Quirke's daughter, Phoebe, gets the worst of it (again). The poor girl can't seem to catch a break. Please, Mr. Black/Banville, let the girl have a little normal sex in the next volume. You are almost as mean to her as Tolstoy is to Anna Karenina.

After reading "Christine Falls" my expectations were high for this next Quirke installment. Let me add, I am a huge fan of this writer, John Banville, in his so very successful, established genre of previous writings.
In brief, this writing was so much less than his usual brilliant prose, character development, rhythm -- you name it -- it missed -- to say the least! Why? Is he now merely writing for the buck? In his sleep? Drunk? C'mon, John!
Step it up, man!

In "The Silver Swan," Benjamin Black brings back the dour and solitary Garret Quirke, who lives in Dublin in the 1950s and works as a pathologist in the Hospital of the Holy Family. Quirke is an alcoholic who avoids drinking except for one bottle of wine that he and his daughter, Phoebe, share at their weekly dinner. Although he is desperately trying to stay sober, he occasionally gets the urge to indulge: "Quirke longed suddenly for a drink, just the one: short, quick, disastrous. For, of course, it would not be just the one." One day, he receives a message from a former acquaintance, Billy Hunt. The body of Billy's much younger wife, Deirdre, has been found after she apparently flung herself off Sandycove Harbor into the waters of Dublin Bay. Billy tells Quirke, "I don't want her cut up," meaning that he does not want a postmortem done on Deirdre. Although Quirke tells Billy, "I'll see what I can do," after he examines the corpse, the pathologist realizes that Deirdre's death is not as straightforward as it seems. Even after the coroner rules that Deirdre drowned accidentally, Quirke decides to look into the matter further.

Black is a literary stylist who revels in long descriptive passages laced with elegant similes and metaphors. He uses an omniscient narrator to delve into each character's innermost thoughts. Even after Deirdre's death, the author utilizes flashbacks to explore the inner demons that drove this tortured woman to engage in reckless behavior. She had been a beautiful girl with reddish gold hair and brilliant blue eyes; sadly, her impoverished and angst-ridden childhood left her scarred for life. Partly to escape her unrelenting misery, she married Billy Hunt, a stolid man nearly sixteen years her senior. He was a salesman who traveled a great deal and the couple was childless; this left Deirdre with a great deal of time on her hands. She eventually met two people who would seal her fate: one was Dr. Hakeem Kreutz, who called himself a "spiritual healer"; the other was Leslie White, a shiftless rogue who exploited gullible young women. Deirdre took White on as her business partner; they opened a beauty salon called "The Silver Swan" and Deirdre renamed herself Laura Swan.

Quirke is a cynic who has seen people at their worst. As a young orphan, he was confined to a workhouse, the Carricklea Industrial School, where the Catholic priests tried to beat religious pieties into him. He also endured some terrible experiences, recounted in the first book of this series, "Christine Falls," that deepened his bitterness and pessimism. Quirke has not forgotten a series of heartbreaking events that left two young women dead, with a "cloak of silence drawn over the affair, leaving [Quirke] standing alone in his indignation." This time, Quirke is determined to exact justice for Deirdre. If she did not kill herself, who did and why? "Quirke was aware of the old itch to cut into the quick of things, to delve into the dark of what was hidden--to know."

The author is a virtuoso at evoking emotion and creating atmosphere; he portrays every room and character with painstaking detail. Readers who take pleasure in vivid word pictures will enjoy "The Silver Swan" far more than those who are fond of fast-moving dialogue and a tight narrative. The characters are meticulously delineated: Quirke has crippling regrets that have mired him in guilt and psychological torpor; Detective Inspector Hackett, an unprepossessing but extremely sharp individual, sees beneath the surface of things far more than Quirke; twenty-three year old Phoebe, Quirke's emotionally stunted daughter, has not forgiven her father for his past betrayals; Englishman Leslie White, who is "handsome, in a pale, jaded sort of way," is a rogue and a freeloader who uses Deirdre shamelessly; Kate is Leslie's long-suffering wife who puts up with her husband's peccadilloes until she cannot stand it anymore.

The novel's ma

What's in a name? Not much for Man Booker Prize winner John Banville, who, writing as Benjamin Black, brings back his potential series character, Quirke, for a second case.

THE SILVER SWAN --- as in the first book, CHRISTINE FALLS --- is set in 1950s Dublin, a place rendered as overcast and gloomy. Quirke is still a persnickety pathologist who spent a good deal of his time drinking his troubles away. But, as this novel opens, he has given up the bottle and is mourning the death of Sarah, his first love. Twenty years ago, circumstances interfered and he got together with Delia, Sarah's sister. She seduced him into marriage, then sadly died in childbirth. Ironically, Quirke gave the infant girl, Phoebe, to Sarah and her husband Mal to bring up as their own. They decided that Phoebe would never know the truth. Now, her "mother[s]" are dead and she is an unhappy loner who judges her world harshly.

Mal's father (Phoebe's presumed grandfather) "Garret Griffin, or the Judge, as everyone called him, has been felled by a stroke [at] seventy [three] that paralyzed him entirely, except for the muscles of his mouth and eyes and the tendons of his neck." The tangled web of relationships between these people began years ago when Griffin rescued Quirke from Carricklea Industrial School and tried to make him feel part of the family. The secrets, lies, resentments and jealousies that bind these people together remain a big burden to everyone involved in the sordid goings-on.

Then, out of the blue, Quirke receives a call from an old school acquaintance, Billy Hunt, who asks to set up a meeting. As the two men awkwardly sit across from each other in a pub, Hunt tells Quirke that his wife Deidre, who also used the name Laura Swan (in the beauty-spa business she ran with her partner, Leslie White), committed suicide. He has just come from identifying the body. That was bad enough, he says, but to think of her on a slab "cut up like some sort of carcass... If you'd known her, the way she was before, how - how alive she was. I can't bear it" --- and he implores Quirke not to do a postmortem on the body.

Deidre was found naked and dead on the rocks beside the body of water in which she drowned. Her clothes were neatly folded, and her car was not far away. She left no note, and no one had the least suspicion that she was depressed or suicidal. Without committing himself to Hunt's request, Quirke's unquenchable curiosity gets him involved in the quest to find out what really happened to Mrs. Hunt.

"For Quirke a corpse was a vessel containing a conundrum, the conundrum being the cause of death. Ethics? It was precisely to avoid such weighty questions that he had gone in for pathology. He did prefer the dead over the living. That was what had happened. No trouble there. Nevertheless he maintains his humanity and his curiousity forces him to seek out the truth. He expects the corpse to help him determine cause of death, especially in cases that are not clear-cut." And the death of Deidre is just such a situation, especially "after he had chanced on [a] needle mark in the woman's arm." Thus he goes ahead with the autopsy, and when he lies to the coroner's court about the cause of death, he is further drawn into this twisted case. Quirke now knows that his wife was probably murdered and is determined to ferret out the killer or killers.

Deidre's partner, Leslie, is a con man of the first order. And he has always been mixed up in some shady deal or other, which always falls flat and loses money. He is a charmer, and women fall under his spell. That is what happened to Deidre and later to Phoebe.

Leslie plays an interesting role in this multi-layered thriller. He is involved with a "spiritual healer," Dr. Kruetz, who "is a Sufi [a religion] based on the secret teachings of the Prophet Muhammad." His office is otherworldly with its different teasing scents, vivid colors