From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Black's engrossing third crime thriller set in 1950s Dublin (after The Silver Swan) finds pathologist Garret Quirke fresh from a stint in alcohol rehab. Quirke reluctantly agrees to help his daughter, Phoebe Griffin, with whom he has a tenuous relationship, find her missing best friend, April Latimer, a junior doctor at a local hospital. Quirke soon finds that members of the powerful Latimer family have all but disowned April, and yet he's sure they know more than they're letting on. Phoebe does her own sleuthing among the group of friends she shared with April, including a stage actress, a handsome Nigerian surgical student, and a reporter. Black (the pen name of Booker Prize–winner John Banville) is equally concerned with exploring the idea of family and loyalty as with spinning a suspenseful whodunit, and his depiction of a fragile father-daughter relationship is as powerful as the unsettling truth behind April's disappearance. Author tour. (Apr.)
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From
If _Elegy for April *isn't the author's best book to date, it certainly boasts the elements for which he is known: a brooding, dark main character; a literary elegance; and, most of all, an evocation of a gloomy Dublin in which "class and religious divisions and [the city's] urgent, albeit repressed, sexual atmospheres helps his characters spring from the page" (*Los Angeles Times_). The only major point of contention was the plot, which a couple of critics felt was too contrived and slow. ("Mystery plotting is hardly [Banville's] primary concern," noted the New York Times.) But if readers won't lie awake turning the pages, they will cherish Banville's style. "When English prose looks like it's dying, the critic Cyril Connolly once said, an Irishman comes along with something to revive it and demolish the clich?s" (_Los Angeles Times_).