© Editions Robert Laffont, 2014
Dublin, 1956: On a sweltering summer afternoon, newspaper tycoon Richard Jewell — known to his many enemies as Diamond Dick — is discovered with his head blown off by a shotgun blast. While his own paper portrays his death as the result of a cerebral haemorrhage, rumours begin to spread that he committed suicide. Detective Inspector Hackett, however, suspects murder and calls in his old friend Quirke for help with the investigation.
Jewell's coolly elegant French wife, Françoise, seems less than shocked by her husband's death. But Dannie, Jewell's high-strung sister, is devastated, and Quirke is surprised to learn that in her grief she has turned to an unexpected friend: David Sinclair, Quirke's ambitious assistant in the pathology lab at the Hospital of the Holy Family. Sinclair, in turn, has been seeing Quirke's fractious daughter Phoebe, and an unlikely romance is blossoming between the two. As a record heat wave envelops the city and the secret deals underpinning Diamond Dick's empire begin to be revealed, Quirke and Hackett find themselves caught up in a dark web of intrigue and violence that threatens to end in disaster.
Mantle 2011
Translated into: Catalan, French
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