The arrival of a new installment in John Banville’s highly successful Quirke/Strafford series gladdens my heart. The latest, The Drowned, which I think is the tenth, continues and extends a very popular franchise. Continuity matters to devotees of such series. Familiar characters (Quirke, the pathologist, and Strafford, the Inspector), a familiar setting (Dublin in the 1950s), and most of all a familiar atmosphere or ambiance, a world of looming menace, the immanence of illness and death, and the strategies we all deploy to make sense of it all while searching for happiness.

It is clear Banville understands very well how the success of such series depends on a balance of the familiar with the new. The Drowned sees one established character depart while the stage is set for the entrance of new ones. Established relationships shift into a different gear, all against the background of a fairly straightforward plot.

Banville is a wonderfully sensitive and skilled storyteller. The Drowned, like its predecessors in the series, is the sort of novel one wants to devour in a single sitting, perhaps sitting by the fire on a winter’s day, or on a long, comfortable train journey.