Benjamin Black is the pen name of acclaimed author John Banville, who was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. His novels have won numerous awards, most recently the Man Booker Prize in 2005 for The Sea. He lives in Dublin.

"Grippingly propulsive . . . Christine Falls was the most artful noir mystery in years; The Silver Swan is better." --Los Angeles Times

"[Black] proved he could walk the crime-fiction walk with the Edgar(R)-nominated Christine Falls, and now his luminous prose gets an even better infrastructure in the sequel, a faster-paced, further melancholic slice of the noir life of Dublin pathologist Quirke." --Baltimore Sun

"If you like your mysteries like Guinness--dark and Irish--look no further." --Rocky Mountain News(Denver)

"[A] brilliant book." --The Seattle Times

"A superb sense of place and an unsettling atmosphere of dread and repressed desire." --The Providence Journal

"A satisfying blend of the muck, and pluck, of the Irish . . . The author knows 1950s Dublin inside and out and the narrative drives onward with pitch-perfect passages." --The Christian Science Monitor

"[Black] is a superb, evocative writer." --The Miami Herald

"Black's prose is as clear and moody as Banville's, never stooping to cliché in word, image, or concept. . . . The delicate but inexorable suspense grows in the natural way, from misunderstanding, deceit, loneliness, and fear." --The Oregonian (Portland)

"[Black's] sinuous prose, subtle eroticism, and 1950s period detail do more than enough to put this series on the map." --The New York Times Book Review