"April in Spain" by John Banville

An audio book.

Terry Tice, raised in an Irish orphanage then a soldier in SE Asia etc, became an enforcer in London. He thinks he likes killing people because it makes things tidier. People think that he doesn't have emotions but he loves his gun. He's killed 6 times. He lives with rich Percy. 6 rooms to himself. He fellates him but nothing more. In return he steals from him. Then Percy is killed. Terry moves out, goes back to Dublin, buys a few gun.

Quirke and wife Evelyn (a pyschologist), both married before, holiday in North Spain. He sees a woman who's familiar somehow. She's animated, with an older man. His wife is Austrian and still has secrets. Relatives died in concentration camps. He's a pathologist, we're finally told. They invite the couple - they're doctors, she's Irish. Quirke thinks she's April Latimer. Years ago, her brother said he'd killed her, then he killed himself. She was a friend of his daughter.

Phoebe waits for Paul (who's Evelyn's cousin) at an airport. She used to go here with a man she thought was her uncle. Actually he was her father, Quirke. After Quirke phones her, asking her to come to Spain, she visits April's uncle, a politician (Minister of defence). She suspects that he knows April is alive. How much else does he know? Phoebe knows that April and her brother were abused by their father, that April was made pregnant by her brother, and that she had an abortion.

April's uncle asks Gallagan, the head of the Civil Service, to deal with April. Gallagan, gay, has contacts. One of those contacts knows Tice, who is sent to Spain. Meanwhile, a policeman goes with Phoebe to Spain to identify the woman. Tice attacks April, who throws acid in his face. Tice escapes, botches a second muder attempt and kills Evelyn and the policeman kills Tice.

April's uncle is forced to resign.

There's little plot, but I was never bored. The conversation between Quirke and Evelyn is fun, so are Terry's thoughts.

Police tour the Spanish beach "to make sure that no-one, especially not a women, was showing more than the minimum of bare skin" - shouldn't "minimum" be "maximum"?

Other reviews

• Doug Battersby ( The publication of this latest Quirke novel under Banville’s literary moniker raises the question of its intended audience — crime fiction fans hooked on Black’s distinctive brand of Dublin noir or devotees of the introspective literary works, more invested in sublimely poetic prose than anything resembling a suspenseful plot? I suspect that the former will be more enthused by April in Spain than the latter. ... The subtly playful, lyrically evocative and polished prose, meanwhile, is evidently of a calibre rarely seen in crime fiction today. That said, readers of literary fiction may find it hard to overlook the extent to which the morose, alcoholic, enigmatic Quirke is, if not quite a figure of cliché, then certainly cut from a thoroughly familiar cloth, his self-sabotaging behaviour following a fairly predictable pattern. Characters’ philosophical ruminations on the nature of memory, desire and loss likewise come across as rather halfhearted, even tired, compared to those found in Banville’s finest works)
• Reading Matters (The narrative eventually brings all these characters together in a surprising end, although it’s a slim premise for a crime novel. The strength of April in Spain is really the way in which Banville tells his story and builds suspense via his beautifully crafted prose ... I suspect diehard readers of the crime genre might find this novel a little disappointing.)
• Harriet