Smaller and Smaller Circles

F.H. Batacan

ISBN: 9781616953980

Published: August, 2015

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Paperback $15.95

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F.H. Batacan

Philippines

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Description

Widely regarded as the first Filipino crime novel, Smaller and Smaller Circles is a poetic masterpiece of literary noir.

Payatas, a 50-acre dump in northeast Manila, is home to thousands of people who live off of what they can scavenge. It is one of the poorest neighborhoods in a city whose law enforcement is ...

Widely regarded as the first Filipino crime novel, Smaller and Smaller Circles is a poetic masterpiece of literary noir.

Payatas, a 50-acre dump in northeast Manila, is home to thousands of people who live off of what they can scavenge. It is one of the poorest neighborhoods in a city whose law enforcement is stretched thin and rife with corruption. So when the eviscerated bodies of preteen boys begin to appear in the trash heaps in the rainy summer of 1997, there is no one to seek justice on their behalf—until two Jesuit priests, forensic anthropologist Father Gus Saenz and his protégé, Father Jerome Lucero, take the matter of protecting their flock into their own hands.

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“Vivid, shocking, and utterly engrossing. F. H. Batacan’s police procedural with its priest–PI lead opens a fascinating window on the Philippines.”
—Barry Lancet, Barry Award-winning author of Japantown and Tokyo Kill
“A dirty, gritty police procedural with a good-guy detective, who also happens to be a Jesuit priest and a forensic anthropologist ... Satisfyingly paced, and crime-thriller gruesome. ”
—Time Out Beijing
“Moody, gripping, original, and utterly irresistible ... A unique and necessary step in the evolution of Philippine fiction. ”
—Citation for the Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award
“Horrifying pleasure ... The Payatas dumpsite is now given an even more menacing air as the setting for a series of gruesome murders ... It is the mind of the killer that is the driving force of the story. We are taken into the mind of a psychopath and we realize, with a little shock of pleasure, that we understand just how it thinks.”
—Review Circle
“A well-paced and plotted mystery and an intriguing look at the various social strata of the capital city of the Philippines. The social issues raised by its location in a burgeoning, Catholic-21st-century metropolis are explored in subtle detail.”
—Library Journal
“[Smaller and Smaller Circles] reaches for big things and gets them. There is no cheap sex, no senseless shootouts, no fountains of blood or car chases ... Instead the book is a witness to appalling poverty and to the manipulation of the weak by the strong.”
—Reviewing the Evidence
“It's good to know that Batacan plans to give us more of these two investigating Jesuits. Their triumphs may not gain full justice in a land where so much is politically impossible—but they have each other's back, and they know what they're called to do, and who is calling them to action. ”
—Kingdom Books