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Finished John Banville's Snow - no author can better evoke 1950's Ireland in the winter - the bone numbing chill both of the weather and the Catholic church hierarchy.
A crime novel, rather than a mystery, set in a locked snowed-in house at Christmas, that focuses on the individual miseries of the suspects and police force. A Catholic priest is brutally murdered in the night. Where it almost doesn't matter if the Protestant detective solves the case or not -- the Archbishop is sure to suppress any discoveries. Thin on actual mystery, but knee deep in atmosphere and character ... brooding.
Banville teases the reader by using character names found in his previous books - Quirke and Osbourne.
I either read a new Banville novel straight through or drop it after a chapter or two ... I read this one through.
My only quibble (and it applies to many current novels) is that the conclusion is slammed abruptly onto the end of the novel, and its tone is jarringly out of tune with the previous pages. Maybe this was intentional.
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