John Banville

John Banville is the author of 16 previous novels including The Infinities, The Book of Evidence, and The Sea for which he won the Booker Prize in 2005. In 2015, he also won the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. In Snow (Hanover Square Press) a parish priest is found dead in Ballyglass House, the family seat of the aristocratic, secretive Osborne family, and detective Inspector St. John Strafford is summoned to investigate. The year is 1957 and the Catholic Church rules Ireland with an iron fist. Strafford — flinty, 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. The New York Times praised Snow noting that “Time and again, Banville sets up and then deftly demolishes the Agatha Christie format he seems to be aping. Everything that seems creakingly familiar about the country-house murder turns out to be darker and darker still.”