Christine Falls

 Book 15 of my 2025 Reading Challenge

read from January 26 - February 1

Christine Falls by Benjamin Black

published 2006

Summary (via the book jacket)

Quirke and Malachi Griffin were raised as brothers, though Quirke - rescued from an Irish orphanage by Malachy's father, the eminent Judge Garrett Griffin - was always the favored son. But Malachi married the American girl Quirke loved, and Quirke settled for her sister, who died in childbirth soon thereafter. Malachi went on to become a prominent obstetrician and Quirke a hard-drinking pathologist, and for the past twenty years the two have coexisted uneasily as brothers-in-law as well as rivals.

Then one night, after a few drinks at an office party, Quirke shuffles down to the morgue and discovers Malachi altering a file he has no business ever reading. Odd enough in itself to find him there, but the next morning, when the haze has lifted, Quirke begins to suspect that his brother-in-law was in fact tampering with a corpse - and concealing the cause of death. It turns out the body belonged to a young woman named Christine Falls. And as Quirke reluctantly presses on toward the truth behind her death, he comes up against some insidious and very well guarded secrets of Dublin's high Catholic society - which includes members of the Griffin family. But when he is urged - at first subtly and then with considerable violence - to probe no further, he nevertheless finds himself drawn inexorably down a trail that leads him across the ocean to Boston, and deep into his own past.

My Opinion

4 stars

As I read I couldn't shake the feeling that it was very familiar.  The book was published in 2006, years before I started tracking my books on Goodreads, so I considered the very real possibility that I'd actually already read it.  But I don't remember books well so I continued on and by the time I hit some plot twists I was genuinely shocked.  So I don't think I've read it before and maybe the familiarity was from similar themes or settings...a hard drinking pathologist faces his demons and his family.

Somebody who read this book before me (a library copy) made many notes in the margins.  That reader was making literary connections I wasn't, reminding me that I read on a fairly superficial level and there are people who really dig in and analyze books, even silly mysteries like this one.

I'm not interested in continuing the series but I did read the summaries on Goodreads for the rest of them; they gave quite a bit away so I know which characters die and which relationships continue.  That's good enough for me.