Two by John Banville in the Quirke series

 Has anaybody been reading the John Banville novels featuring Quirke, the Dublin pathologist in the postwar years (published under the pseudonym Benjamin Black)? Recently, Benville has started putting them out under his own name. Two recent ones, The Lockup and The Drowned are interrelated in an odd way. There is an enigmatic character who flows through both books: that is to say, he's enigmatic in both books unless you read them in order. At the very end of The Lockup, this character reveals himself completely and without compromise. The same is more or less true for The Drowned, but if you did read the end of the first book, you pretty much know that this character is capable of the crime in the second. I actually did read them in reverse order, and for me The Drowned was better without theh spoiler.

Both books feature Quirke's daughhter prominently, as well as her lover, a detective that Quirke despises. In both cases, the coroner is not so much a crime solver as a tangentially involved party to events, hovering around and occasionally offering evidence (for example, in The Lockup, indications that what had thought to be a suicide was in fact murder). Both books are evocative of Irish urban and rural locations, and Banville's style is literary without getting in the way of the story. The "hook" of the first book is the discovery of a young Jewish woman dead in her car, in a closed garage, her car having run until it was out of gas. The second is a less clear case, involving a group of people circling around the odd disappearance of a woman who drives her car into a field, leaving behind her husband as she disappears in the direction of the sea. Two possible suicides, possibly muurders, and both making interesting and involving novels.