John Banville seems to have found his calling as a writer of very literary yet can't-put-it-down crime novels. April in Spain is a very good one indeed, the best of his books I have read. It seems that everyone in Banville's Ireland has an appalling history of abuse and/or abandonment. Banville believes in morality, but whether one's tortured personal history leads to a life of sin or redemption seems a matter of chance, and the redeemed life is not one that offers consolations– to the contrary, God (Banville) is as content punishing the righteous as the evil. The problem is that Banville's eagerness to punish even his most admirable characters sometimes leads to plotting decisions that stretch credulity. What he does to Quirke by the end of this novel seems cruelly gratuitous and, perhaps for that reason, predictable. And predictability is one sin a crime novelist should avoid committing.
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