My review of John Banville's latest novel is online today at Shiny New Books. It's only the second of his books I've read, and like the first one, The Black-Eyed Blonde, it's a crime novel. Banville, a highly literary novelist, who, among many other prizes, has won the Booker, has in the past published his crime novels under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, but, as I explain in the review, he's decided to kill Black off, so this one appears in his own name.
Set in the late 1950s, Snow shares many elements of classic crime novels, not least because it's set in a country house (this one in County Wexford), where the pool of suspects is very small, being limited by the fact that the house is more or less cut off by an exceptionally heavy fall of snow. The victim is a Catholic priest, Father Tom, who was a frequent visitor to this Protestant house, and the detective, D.I. St John Strafford (his first name pronounced Sinjun) is Protestant landed gentry, and - as he's only too aware - an unlikely member of the predominantly Catholic police force. And his investigations are severely curtailed by the heavy hand of the Catholic Church.
There's so much to enjoy in this novel. If you want to know more, read my review here.
