Set in 1950s Dublin and Boston, this story centres around Quirke, a pathologist in Dublin, who finds his brother-in-law creating a death certificate for the very dead, very young and once pregnant Christine Falls. Unable to accept Malachy’s explanation, Quirke keeps picking away at the circumstances of Christine’s death, which takes him to the core of the brotherhood of one of Dublin’s Catholic and very secretive societies. Landing in Boston on a family mission, he finds that Christine’s story has also crossed the Atlantic and her death has resonances very close to home.

Benjamin Black is the crime-writing pseudonym of Irish writer John Banville, so I was quite intrigued to see how this novel would read. It touches on yet another shady corner of Ireland’s past where the Catholic Church and its conservative devotees held great sway in a country that was still only 30 years into independence from Great Britain by the early 1950s.

Essentially, Christine was unfortunate enough to have become pregnant whilst still a single woman. In Ireland at the time, and for many years later, single women who became pregnant were ‘sent’ into institutions run by Catholic religious orders until they gave birth. Then, the babies were adopted, mostly by Irish couples, but often babies were ’sent’ abroad for adoption by ‘good’ Catholic families in the US.

Christine died in childbirth which is why she ended up in Quirke’s morgue. As he delves into her background and tries to uncover Malachy’s connection, we discover that Quirke was in fact ’rescued’ from an orphanage in the west of Ireland by Malachy’s father, a prominent judge, and reared alongside Malachy. Later, the two men married American sisters, with Quirke’s wife dying in childbirth.

With so many parallels between Christine’s story and Quirke’s own life, it’s not surprising that he is tenacious in his investigation. The plot thickens when we discover that Christine used to work in Malachy’s house and that Quirke and Malachy’s wife have unfinished romantic business.

As a novel about how Ireland dealt with babies ’born out of wedlock’, this is an interesting introduction to that sorry saga if you’re not familiar with it. Ironically, I was reading the novel just as the first report on this period was published in Ireland.

However, the story failed to engage me – yes, the physical settings of Dublin and Boston are evocatively painted, and I liked the damaged character of Quirke. But the main female characters are too weak to sustain interest: from the insipid Sarah, Malachy’s wife; to Brenda the nurse, or Claire Stafford in Boston. Other women have an edge and little else: hard-bitten Cora in Boston, Josh Crawford’s wealth-grabbing wife in Boston, the woman in Dublin who ‘handles’ the babies in between their transit to new homes … They’re all too one-dimensional for my liking.

So, interesting, yes; riveting, not exactly. IMHO.