The 1950s Dublin setting - all Guinness drays, blackbird song and biscuit-factory smells - is rendered as sensuously as it would be in any novel by Banville, a writer having fun of the highest standard.

"Make no mistake, Black is a grand writer with a seductive style, and the dark, repressive world he makes of postwar Dublin — when there’s no shortage of religious brothers to run the workhouses or nuns to operate the convent hospitals — goes a long way to explain why everyone in this morally claustrophobic world is so sex-mad. But the conventions of crime fiction provide structural security for any exploratory attack on the subject of evil (or sin, as Black’s characters are more apt to define it), and failing to take full advantage of that freedom is like traveling all the way to Ireland and neglecting to visit either a church or a pub."

The Silver Swan is a defter and more complex book than its predecessor, which occasionally found plot development smothered under the weight of Banville / Black's always ravishing prose.