Christine Falls has been nominated for a 2008 Edgar Award for Best Novel and is the first in the Quirke series.

The book is set in Ireland and the U.S. in the 1950s. Quirk is somewhere in his 40s. He is, if not an outright alcoholic, at least a very hard drinker and the head of the pathology department at Holy Family Hospital in Dublin. As a youth he was taken from an orphanage by Judge Garrett Griffin and raised with the Judges son, Malachy, known as Mal. Mal also went into medicine and became a much-in-demand obstetrician.

One evening Quirk returns to the morgue, drunk after a going away party, and sees Malachy working on a file where he had no business working. They chat and Quirk leaves, stumbles, and pulls the sheet from a corps. In spite of being dead drunk, Quirk is aware enough to note the name on the toe tag before passing out, Christina Falls.

The next day Quirk begins to recall the events of the night before and discovers that the body of Christina Falls is no longer there and that the file Mal was altering was that of the same Christina Falls. The cause of death has been listed as pulmonary embolism. After having the body recalled to the morgue, Quirk discovers that she actually died in childbirth. Mal and Sarah have a daughter, Phoebe, to whom Quirk is close.

Quirk is compelled to find out why Malachy was falsifying the cause of death and begins tracing Christina Falls? life backwards, He is warned off  warned off by a man wearing the pin of the Knights of St. Patrick who has ties to Judge Griffin and Mal. The Catholic Church and his adopted family have a secret that worries at Quirk. This is another book where the Church in Ireland does not come across well. Another Edgar Award nominee, Priest by Ken Bruen, also takes a hard look at the Church.

The story, begun in Ireland, has its natural conclusion in the U.S., tying events that occurred in Dublin with people and family on this side of the Atlantic.

Christina Falls is carefully crafted, layered, story. It builds slowly but not slow enough to seem ponderous.  It also spans a good part of a year so it isn?t a fast paced suspense story over in a couple of days. Black takes his time building his characters, revealing more of them as the story goes along. Early on we discover that Mal and Quirk have an uneasy relationship. Quirk seems to be the favored son despite being adopted into the family. We also learn that Mal married the American woman from Boston that Quirk loved, Sarah, and Quirk ended up marrying her sister, Delia, who died in childbirth.

Black has written an excellent character-driven story with a compelling story to move it forward. Quirk will make an interesting series character.