The hospital staff drinks and dances at a going-away party for one of the nurses. It’s past midnight in the 1950s at the Holy Family Hospital in Dublin, Ireland.

The pathologist Quirke needs to escape the party so he retreats to the morgue. There he finds his hated brother Malachy (portentously known as Mal), one of the obstetricians, writing up a death certificate for a young woman. Her toe tag reads Christine Falls. Mal gives an evasive explanation. Quirke passes out drunk amidst the corpses before he can press his brother further.

Suspicious, Quirke orders an autopsy that reveals that Christine died in childbirth and not from heart troubles as Mal claims. So what happened to Christine’s baby, and why is Mal involved?

Mal and Quirke have a complicated family history. Quirke was adopted by Mal’s father, the Judge. He became the Judge’s favorite son. Later, Quirke and Mal visited the Boston home of Josh Crawford, a millionaire friend of the Judge. Quirke fell in love with Crawford’s daughter Sarah. However, he chose to marry her sister Delia while Mal settled for Sarah. Delia died in childbirth. Mal and Sarah had one child Phoebe. They sank into a loveless marriage punctuated by Sarah’s psychological troubles and Quirke’s destructive manipulations. Everyone knows he still covets Sarah.

So Quirke starts investigating. He finds out that Christine died at the house of Dolly Moran. He visits Dolly only to discover that both women had been servants in the house of the Judge. The mystery is starting to strike close to home. When thugs murder Dolly days later, Quirke realizes that he is in grave danger. Yet his thirst for the truth will propel him all the way back to Boston to the lair of Josh Crawford.

Two questions drive the plot. The first (“Who is the father of Christine’s baby?”) is immediately obvious to most seasoned mystery fans. The second (“Who are these shadowy people who are trafficking in stolen babies, and why are they doing it?”) is more interesting. It’s the second question that grips you if you can make it through the slow beginning. The author wastes too much time initially on Phoebe’s rebellious crush on a Protestant boy.

The novel’s strength is the beautiful writing. The author draws the atmosphere of 1950s Dublin close around you: the heavy winter weather, the gray streets, the smug provincialism of the working class. He can switch character viewpoints within a single sentence with flawless control. Not too surprising since “Benjamin Black” is a pseudonym for John Banville, the Irish author who won the 2005 Booker Prize for The Sea.

The novel’s weakness is its negative characters. Everyone in Christine Falls is either spiteful and manipulative or depressingly victimized. When you have no characters worth spending time on, it can make for a heavy slog of a read. Still, if you’re partial to Irish culture, and you like your mysteries dark, you might enjoy Christine Falls, which can be found on Amazon through this link: Christine Falls: A Novel