The Lock-Up: A Novel

Summary

Booker Prize winner John Banville’s most ambitious crime novel yet brings two detectives together to solve a globe-spanning mystery.

In 1950s Dublin, Rosa Jacobs, a young history scholar, is found dead in her car. Renowned pathologist Dr. Quirke and Detective Inspector John Strafford begin to investigate the death as a murder, but it’s the victim’s older sister Molly, an established journalist, who discovers a lead that could crack open the case.

One of Rosa’s friends, it turns out, is from a powerful German family that arrived in Ireland under mysterious circumstances shortly after World War II. But as Quirke and Strafford close in, their personal lives may put the case—and everyone involved—in peril, including Quirke’s own daughter.

Spanning the mountaintops of Italy, the front lines of World War II Bavaria, the gritty streets of Dublin. and other unexpected locales, The Lock-Up is an ambitious and arresting mystery by one of the world’s most celebrated authors.