What’s going on here? That was the question I kept asking myself as I read the first few chapters of Snow. Why is a writer as sophisticated and as clever as John Banville pulling me into what seems like a classic Agatha Christie-style murder mystery? A Catholic priest is killed in a grand but faded country house, his mutilated body placed carefully in the library. Who’s the murderer? The old soldier who owns the house, his nervous wife, her shifty brother, the stable boy, the local doctor? Only very gradually did it occur to me that it was the very familiarity of this archaic, slightly stale genre, with its precise rules and restrictions, that Banville wanted as his setting for a theme altogether more ambitious: the horrors of clerical abuse and the subtle divisions in Irish society perpetrated by religion and social class.

In the harsh winter of 1957, Inspector Strafford is sent from Dublin to rural Wexford to investigate the brutal murder of Father Lawless. The crime is perpetrated in a house belonging to a member of the Protestant gentry, a milieu very familiar to Strafford, himself a Protestant. In a country and at a time in which the Catholic church has immense influence, Strafford is expected to uncover and conceal, to solve the crime but also to bury its most salacious circumstances.

Snow is a powerful novel but not an entirely satisfying story. Banville interrupts the action with an “interlude” narrated by the victim, a device that somewhat clumsily reveals the motive for the murder without divulging the identity of the killer. Although Strafford solves the crime, he does so without exercising much skill. Snow offers little to hardcore fans of mystery fiction, but I doubt that will bother Banville much. The decades of abuse perpetrated by priests and its systematic cover-up by an all-powerful Church – those are the crimes he wants us to remember.