Two victims - one dead, one missing. Even the Dead is a visceral, gritty and cinematic thriller from Benjamin Black. Every web has a spider sitting at the centre of it. Pathologist Quirke is back working in the city morgue, watching over Dublin's dead. When a body is found in a burnt-out car, Quirke is called in to verify the apparent suicide of an up-and-coming civil servant. But Quirke can't shake a suspicion of foul play.The only witness has vanished, every trace of her wiped away. Piecing together her disappearance, Quirke finds himself drawn into the shadowy world of Dublin's elite - secret societies and high church politics, corrupt politicians and men with money to lose. When the trail eventually leads to Quirke's own family, the past and present collide. But crimes of the past are supposed to stay hidden, and Quirke has shaken the web.Now he must wait to see what comes running out.'Addiction, morbid sexual obsession, blackmail and murder, as well as prose as crisp as a winter's morning by the Liffey ...Quirke is human enough to swell the hardest of hearts''Quirke is an endearing hero and the Dublin of the 1950s - wet, cold, foggy, sinister - is evoked with harsh realism and nostalgia' The Times. 'A requiem for a cursed city, its inhabitants' inner lives doomed to remain as locked away, unhappy and unknowable as whatever lies buried' Metro.Benjamin Black is the pen name of acclaimed author John Banville, who was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of fifteen novels, including The Sea, which won the 2005 Man Booker Prize. In 2011 he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, in 2013 he was awarded the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Achievement in Irish Literature, and in 2014 he won the Prince of Asturias Award, Spain's most important literary prize. He lives in Dublin. Even the Dead is the seventh book in Benjamin Black's Quirke series.