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Snow

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
*NATIONAL BESTSELLER*
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA HISTORICAL DAGGER AWARD*
A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
A New York Times Editors' Choice Pick
"Banville sets up and then deftly demolishes the Agatha Christie format...superbly rich and sophisticated."—New York Times Book Review
The incomparable Booker Prize winner's next great crime novel—the story of a family whose secrets resurface when a parish priest is found murdered in their ancestral home
Detective Inspector St. John Strafford has been summoned to County Wexford to investigate a murder. A parish priest has been found dead in Ballyglass House, the family seat of the aristocratic, secretive Osborne family.
The year is 1957 and the Catholic Church rules Ireland with an iron fist. Strafford—flinty, visibly Protestant and determined to identify the murderer—faces obstruction at every turn, from the heavily accumulating snow to the culture of silence in the tight-knit community he begins to investigate.
As he delves further, he learns the Osbornes are not at all what they seem. And when his own deputy goes missing, Strafford must work to unravel the ever-expanding mystery before the community's secrets, like the snowfall itself, threaten to obliterate everything.
Beautifully crafted, darkly evocative and pulsing with suspense, Snow is "the Irish master" (New Yorker) John Banville at his page-turning best.
Don't miss John Banville's next novel, The Lock-up!
Other riveting mysteries from John Banville:
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      • AudioFile Magazine
        So melodious is his voice, so seductive his accent, and so energetic his narration that I might be willing to listen to John Lee reading the Manhattan Directory. Happily, he has far, far richer material than that in this bottomless novel by the brilliant and bold Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk. In the story, a somewhat pompous and naïve expatriate Turkish poet returns to his native home, drawn by love and curiosity, and encounters all manner of characters who never conform to his expectations. The timbre of Lee's voice and his brogue might put you in mind of Sean Connery. Conveying an exotic, distinctly non-Western atmosphere, Lee displays the natural gifts of a storyteller who invests every sentence with verve and subtlety. M.O. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
      • AudioFile Magazine
        This devilish mystery is set in southeast Ireland in 1957. British narrator John Lee does a masterful job with Irish accents. He provides pitch-perfect renditions of the locals and brings to life the Protestant gentry's upper-crust speech, especially that of Detective Inspector Strafford. But Lee's most memorable and affecting portrayals are those of the local police, the innkeeper, his wife, and their endearing housemaid--all performed with authentic brogues. The plot centers on the killing of a priest who is a serial child molester. John Banville has written a nuanced whodunit with clues as complex as the pattern in a tapestry. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
      • Booklist

        Starred review from August 1, 2020
        Booker Prize winner Banville has typically written crime fiction as Benjamin Black, but here he switches to his own name for a new mystery set in 1957 at the forbidding Ballyglass House, a country manor in Ireland's County Wexford. You know Banville is evoking the genre's Golden Age from the first words?"The body is in the library"?but, almost as quickly, you realize that this is not an Agatha Christie novel. Throughout, Banville decorates his deceptively complex mystery with literary flourishes ("the books stood shoulder to shoulder in an attitude of mute resentment") and uses familiar classical-era tropes to camouflage the darkness lurking below the surface. Our narrator is Detective Inspector St. John Strafford, a protestant in a Catholic country, called upon to solve the murder of a Catholic priest stabbed and castrated at the home of a reclusive protestant family. The closets of the Osborne clan are stuffed with kinky secrets, evoking the Sternwoods from Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, especially sultry daughter Lettie, a would-be vixen in the manner of thumb-sucking Carmen Sternwood. Strafford initially sees the case as straightforward but, fighting obstruction from the Catholic hierarchy, soon finds himself in another country altogether, where "everything swayed and wallowed," as the area is engulfed in a snowstorm, and the bodies accumulate. No order-restoring resolution here, in this brilliant mix of old tropes and sadly modern evil.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

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    • English

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