Christine Falls (2007)

EW PICK

After a suspicious body rolls across his desk in Benjamin Black's Christine Falls, jolly Irish coroner Quirke gets entangled in a conspiracy involving stolen babies and malevolent nuns in the '50s.

Grisliest Death A woman is tied to a chair and left for dead.

Lowdown Crime fiction rarely lives up to the term ''literary,'' but Falls (by Man Booker Prize winner John Banville under a pseudonym) is the happy exception. Falls starts slow, but builds to a melancholy, satisfying conclusion.