Book Review: John Banville, Snow

Having dispensed with the nom de plume Benjamin Black, John Banville’s first crime novel under his own name nonetheless maintains the engrossing atmosphere and compelling twists that have made the Black series so popular.

Boasting as satisfying a first line of dialogue as you could hope for – “The body’s in the library, come this way” – Snow finds Det Insp John Strafford investigating the murder of a Catholic priest in the stately home of a Protestant family in ‘50s Wexford. As well as being a gripping mystery story, the novel also proves a quietly powerful meditation on mid-century Ireland’s social conservatism and subservience to the Catholic Church.

With stylistic echoes of Chandler and Belgian thriller writer Georges Simenon – the latter in particular a huge personal favourite of Banville – Snow is another superb effort from one of Ireland’s acknowledged literary masters.