In Christine Falls, Man Booker winner John Banville takes the term "flawed character" into the stratosphere with Garret Quirke, a reluctant and unlikely hero who becomes an amateur sleuth as well as a Dublin pathologist.

Quirke drinks to excess and takes perverse delight in keeping himself emotionally isolated. He wears loneliness like a badge of honor, and the name Quirke suits him far too well. The only people in his immediate circle who are able to penetrate the wall he places around himself are his niece, Phoebe, who appears to be infatuated with him, and her mother, his sister-in-law, Sarah, who also happens to be the sister of his long-deceased wife.

Quirke loves Sarah, but settled for and married her sister Delia, who died in childbirth. He appears to be stuck in a perpetual rut in all areas of his life, not just his job at the morgue, and cannot seem to gather enough enthusiasm to upset the status quo until the night he leaves an office party.

Quirke stumbles across a mystery when he walks in on Mal, a prominent obstetrician, altering the death report of Christine Falls, revealed later to be a young woman who had once worked as a maid in Mal’s own home. Quirke’s curiosity aroused, he starts probing into the death and learns his brother-in-law is involved in a cover-up that may also involve their own father, Judge Garret Griffin.

During the first half of the book, the mystery plays second-fiddle to Quirke’s complicated family dynamics and the riveting backdrop of Ireland in the early 1950s. Banville obviously knows his terrain well and delivers vignettes that evoke mood and set the stage as Quirke’s stubborn nature causes him — despite threats to his personal safety — to plod on slowly and relentlessly. His painstaking efforts allow him to discover clues that lead back to members of his own family, and a conspiracy that involves the Catholic Church and its orphanages and convents both in Dublin and Boston.

Despite its thumbnail and absorbing sketches of Dublin life, the first half of Christine Falls also makes the reader work far too hard to develop empathy for Quirke and the rest of his dysfunctional family. It meanders around with the pathologist, perhaps due his propensity for stopping frequently in various bars, while he searches for the reason Mal tampered with evidence that Christine Falls died in childbirth. Despite being a huge, unlovely man, Quirke manages to bed more than his fair share of women throughout this quest, and reveals himself to be unaccountably irresistible.