Not quite a four-star rating, but an enjoyable read. I'll definitely read books 1 and 2 with Quirke as the main character. Maybe I would've enjoyed this one more if I hadn't read it out of order.

The thing I loved most was how Quirke's character is developed in comparison with everyone and everything else in this book. Even the car he purchases is an important character throughout the book. My favorite description: "the thing resisted him, maintaining what seemed to him a sullen obstinacy. Only on occasion, on certain open stretches of the road, did it forget itself and relinquish its hauteur and leap forward with eagerness, almost it seemed with joy, setting up that distinctive muffled roar under the bonnet that made people's head turn. Afterwards, however, when he pulled up at the garage in Herbert Lane, the idling engine seemed to him to be smoldering with renewed, pent-up rancor. He was not good enough to be an Alvis owner; he knew it, the car knew it, and there was nothing to do but gloomily acknowledge the fact and take care that the damned thing did not turn on him and kill him."

I also enjoyed Quirke's relationship with his daughter's friend, Isabel Galloway. An unlikely and inappropriate relationship, captured so beautifully in these lines, "as she sat and gazed at him he felt like a slow old moose caught in the crosshairs of a polished and very powerful rifle...She seemed to be amused at something large and ongoing, a marvelously absurd cavalcade, of which, he suspected, he was just now a part." She continues to make him feel awkward, at one point, "He felt like Alice after she had eaten the magic cake and grown huge."

How can you not like Quirke. Such a charming mess of a man.