The Drowned

Booker winner Banville’s latest crime saga featuring Det. Insp. John Strafford and pathologist Garret Quirke (after April in Spain) is a lyrical but lugubrious affair. On an October evening in the 1950s, hermit Denton Wymes finds an abandoned Mercedes in a field on Ireland’s southeastern coast. Soon, a man named Armitage crests a nearby hill and tells Wymes that his wife may have just drowned herself. The pair seeks help at a nearby cottage, where the residents and Armitage act oddly. After Wymes contacts the police, Strafford’s boss sends him from Dublin to investigate. Upon his arrival, he discovers that Armitage “seemed to regard the disappearance of his wife as little more than an inconvenience,” but without a body, the investigation has little to go on. Instead, Banville zeroes in on Strafford’s impending divorce; his bumbling affair with Quirke’s daughter, Phoebe; and Quirke’s angst about his wife’s recent death. Banville is a formidable stylist (“There was none of summer’s languorous vibrancy, only a great pale-blue stillness,” he writes of autumn’s arrival in a small town), but none of the novel’s domestic drama is particularly gripping, and the solution to the mystery is both underwhelming and too tangled in series lore. It’s a case of atmosphere over action that’s unlikely to satisfy most mystery fans. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Oct.)