I love that Banville has turned his elegant, spare writing style to detective fiction. His mournful detective, St. John (“pronounced Sinjun”) Strafford (“with an R”), has been detailed to Ballyglass to investigate the murder of a priest while the local plod is down with the flu. The village is blanketed by snow, which gives the atmosphere a locked room aspect—there are no footsteps in or out, so the first suspects are the respectable Protestant Osborne family, who boarded Father Tom Lawless’s horse and with whom he often stayed. The story is rife with red herrings, although Banville does not hit the reader over the head with them; he’s much more interested in conveying a sense of Ballyglass in 1957, with its long-simmering religious tensions and its small town gossip. The protagonist reminded me a bit of P. D. James’s Inspector Dalgliesh, who always wants to understand the whole landscape before beginning to zero in on the crime. As a result, you feel as if much more is at stake than the death of one priest and you’d be right.