#2 St. John Strafford

Snow

John Banville
3.52
22,233 ratings 2,759 reviews
Detective Inspector St. John Strafford has been summoned to County Wexford to investigate a murder. A parish priest has been found dead in Ballyglass House, the family seat of the aristocratic, secretive Osborne family. The year is 1957 and the Catholic Church rules Ireland with an iron fist. Strafford—flinty, visibly Protestant, and determined to identify the murderer—faces obstruction at every turn, from the heavily accumulating snow to the culture of silence in this tight-knit community. 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, threatens to obliterate everything. The incomparable Booker Prize winner's next great crime novel - the story of a family whose secrets resurface when a parish priest is found murdered in their ancestral home.
Genres: MysteryFictionCrimeHistorical FictionIrelandAudiobookThrillerMystery ThrillerIrish LiteratureBook Club
304 Pages

Community Reviews:

5 star
3335 (15%)
4 star
8486 (38%)
3 star
7574 (34%)
2 star
2156 (10%)
1 star
682 (3%)

Readers also enjoyed

Other books by John Banville

St. John Strafford Series

Lists with this book

Macbeth
Hamlet
Dracula
One Word Titles
2444 books • 261 voters
Gods of Howl Mountain
Swerve: Little Bastards 2
Fear of Flying
Books Set in the Fifties
85 books • 40 voters
The Midnight Library
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
Anxious People
The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time
The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays
Likes
NYT Editors’ Choice 202010
53 books • 3 voters