Benjamin Black

Ahead of the German Blitz during World War II, English parents from every social class sent their children to the countryside for safety, displacing more than three million young offspring. In The Secret Guests, the British royal family takes this evacuation a step further, secretly moving the princesses to the estate of the Duke of Edenmore in "neutral" Ireland. A female English secret agent, Miss Celia Nashe, and a young Irish detective, Garda Strafford,...

Quirke, an irascible, hard-drinking Dublin pathologist, investigates the apparent suicide of Deidre Hunt, the beautiful young wife of an old acquaintance, and discovers many things that might better have remained hidden, as well as grave danger to those he loves.--From publisher description.

April Latimer has vanished. A junior doctor at a local hospital, she is something of a local scandal in the conservative and highly patriarchal society of 1950s Dublin. Her friend, Phoebe Griffin, suspects the worst. Phoebe seeks out Quirke, her brilliant but erratic father, for help. Sober again after intensive treatment for alcoholism, Quirke uses his knowledge of the darker byways of the city to investigate April's disappearance.

"Christian Stern, an ambitious young scholar and alchemist, arrives in Prague in the bitter winter of 1599, intent on making his fortune at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, the eccentric Rudolf II. The night of his arrival, drunk and lost, Christian stumbles upon the body of a young woman in Golden Lane, an alley hard by Rudolf's great castle. Dressed in a velvet gown, wearing a large gold medallion around her neck, the woman is clearly well-born--or...

"On a sweltering summer afternoon, newspaper tycoon Richard Jewell - known to his many enemies as Diamond Dick - is discovered with his head blown off by a shotgun blast. But is it suicide or murder? Detective Inspector Hackett calls in his old friend Quirke, who has unusual access to Dublin's elite, for help. As a record heat wave envelops the city, and the secret deals underpinning Diamond Dick's empire begin to be revealed, Quirke and Hackett find...

John Glass's life in New York should be plenty comfortable having given up his career as a journalist to write an authorized biography of his father-in-law, communications magnate and former CIA agent Big Bill Mulholland. When a shifty young researcher whom he calls 'The Lemur," turns up some unflattering information about the family, Glass's whole easy existence is threatened.

"A gripping noir crime thriller set in late 1930s Bay City centers around a brooding, down-on-his-luck detective; Philip Marlowe, played by Liam Neeson, who is hired to find the ex-lover of a glamorous heiress, daughter of a well-known movie star. The disappearance is the first twist in a series of bewildering events, and soon Marlowe is embroiled in a deadly investigation and web of lies that he's determined to bring to light." --

In 1950s Dublin, renowned pathologist Dr. Quirke and DI John Strafford investigate the murder of a young history scholar with the help of her journalist sister, and as they close in on the killer, their personal lives put the case, and the lives of everyone involved, in danger.