It turns out that Inspector Hackett’s praise for Quirke is unwarranted. The power of the Catholic Church in the Republic of Ireland is such that the terrible secret at the heart of the latest of Benjamin Black’s novels about the Dublin pathologist, is covered up or mostly so. As a capital city but a small one, with most of what happens concentrated in its Georgian heart, 1950s’ Dublin is a city full of secrets and and networks of familial and institutional authority. Quirke, himself, is a damaged survivor – but only just, judging by his alcoholism and increasing melancholy -- of a church-run orphanage; of the family that adopts him; of his own failings as a father towards his daughter, Phoebe; and of Dublin’s multiple repressions. Although his detections, in the company of the shrewd Hackett, bring him closer to his own past and his society’s failings, they also accord him a purpose in dark days. In this novel, Quirke is drawn into the police investigation into the murder of Jimmy Minor, a character who figured importantly in Elegy for April. Jimmy’s body is dumped in the Grand Union Canal, which forms a close semi-circle around the city’s centre, before being delivered to the basement of the hospital where Quirke works. As Phoebe says, with an immediate and an implied meaning, “You’ve lived too long among the dead, Quirke.” Benjamin Black is John Banville and the Quirke novels have so much by way of style, characterisation, atmosphere, and politics, in the broadest sense, that they make both a significant contribution to the detective genre and to literature more generally. They are also great Dublin novels. Having said that, the strains show from the effort to keep a character going who would make an intriguing hero/anti-hero in a standalone novel but who is needed as a function of the different detective plots across the six Quirke novels to date. Accordingly, there is a repetitive quality, which would not be necessary in a standalone novel: not to the plot, which moves grimly to its conclusion as Quirke intermittently and idiosyncratically interests himself in a celebrity priest (or “sky-pilot” to use Inspector Hackett’s term), but to Quirke’s psycho-pathology. New readers have to be informed of this back-story because it is what keeps Quirke going and to a much greater extent than the central detective in other series, including Raymond Chandler’s novels about Philip Marlowe, to which Black/Banville has recently contributed. It is Quirke’s past -- replaying itself in his present -- that keeps him walking through Dublin’s wet streets to his encounters with the city’s power-elite. Aside from the repetitions, Holy Orders, suffers to the extent that even the crime-plot falters near the end and Black has to call upon Quirke’s and the city’s “family-plot” in the form of Costigan, the Moriarty (Arthur Conan Doyle) or Cafferty (Ian Rankin) character. Having said as much, I still hope that there are more Quirke novels and that the excellent television series, which concluded with Elegy for April, makes a return.