I really thought M.G. Vassanji’s Nostalgia would be right up my alley. Vassanji imagines a world where immortality is possible, and identities can be chosen as humans transfer their consciousness onto an entirely new body when they tire of their current one. Their memories are tucked away, providing the opportunity for a completely fresh start. The term “nostalgia” refers to what they call “Leaked Memory Syndrome,” when the memories belonging to one’s previous body “leak” into one’s current consciousness.

The concept is fantastic, a mix of science fiction and existentialism that tickled my geek bone. As well, I’ve long heard good things about Vassanji’s work, and thought this would be the perfect place to start. Unfortunately, this book just wasn’t for me. It’s a short read at barely over 250 pages, but it took me months to get through it, and I might have decided not to finish it if it hadn’t been such a short book and a review copy.

Nostalgia is the story of Frank Sina, a doctor who specializes in working with patients to generate their new identities. One of his patients, Presley, is suffering from nostalgia, odd flashes of memory of a lion. He escapes treatment and Frank is ordered to help authorities bring him back. Concurrent to this storyline is one about a less developed nation, where a reporter from a CNN-type media outlet is captured by rebels and presumed dead. The story explores questions of politics, inequality and immortality, and I’m sure it’ll be fascinating and thought-provoking for some readers. I just couldn’t get into it.

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Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for an advance reading copy in exchange for an honest review.

I loved the Agatha Christie-ish feel of Ruth Ware’s first thriller In A Dark, Dark Wood, so The Woman in Cabin 10, feature a similar locked room trope also caught my eye. The book begins with the heroine being robbed in her own home, and the tension just ratchets from there. Still recovering from her experience of a break-in, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is grateful for an escape, with an assignment to write a fluff piece about a luxury cruise. One night, she thinks she witnesses the woman in the cabin beside hers being thrown overboard, but when she reports the crime, she learns that all the ship’s passengers are accounted for and that the cabin beside hers was unoccupied.

Like Dark Wood, Cabin 10 provides us a narrator whom others deem unreliable, mostly because of her trauma from the break-in, coupled with heavy drinking in public and a mental health condition. I love that Ware tackles head-on how victims of crime are often judged for their own behaviour, such that their reliability is called into question. (As an aside, I also love that the promo package from the publisher included a pink tube of mascara, which plays a big part in the mystery, but is also useful to have around.)

This book is a tightly wound thriller full of twists and turns. I actually got scared reading it, and was so caught up in the story that I literally jumped at a mysterious sound in my hallway while I was reading. What I love most is that Ware adheres to the rules from the golden age of crime fiction, in particular the one that states that the writer must equip the reader with all the information necessary to solve the mystery themselves. When the big reveal was made, I re-read some of the earlier passages and realized that an important clue was indeed provided for a reader more observant than I to catch. Overall, I found this book utterly gripping, and it was a lot of fun waiting to see how it all turns out.

Q&A with author Ruth Ware

1. How did the idea for this book come around?

It’s funny, because for In a Dark, Dark Wood I had a really clear answer to this – I could pinpoint it to a single conversation. Whereas The Woman in Cabin 10 it’s a lot harder to pin down. I think part of it came about because I was starting the book at the same time as reviews for In a Dark, Dark Wood were beginning to appear. Many of them made reference to Agatha Christie and the way she wrote such excellent “closed room” mysteries. I suppose it got me thinking about her most famous settings – Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, And Then There Were None, and so on. She does that feeling of stifled luxury so well – where her characters are somewhere really beautiful and luxurious, but also terrifying! A cruise felt like a natural way to pay homage to that type of setting – somewhere incredibly glamorous, but at the same time, you can’t get away.

The other element was that while I was writing, there were a lot of he said / she said cases in the news, and it got me thinking about how society looks at different kinds of witnesses and the way some kinds of evidence are given priority over others. It seemed to me that young women – and particularly young, drunk women – were right at the bottom of the pile in terms of how courts and the police viewed their evidence. I wanted to write a narrator who fitted that bill and maybe force people to question their own preconceptions in how they evaluate what Lo sees.

2. What is it about a cruise ship that makes it such a great setting for a murder mystery?

Well aside from all the Christie-ish locked room stuff above, it’s a naturally dangerous setting. You have a built in way of getting rid of bodies, which is incredibly hard to trace, and no law enforcement at hand. There is also the grey legal area that Lo talks about in the book – the way that crimes committed in international waters are very muddy in terms of whose responsibility they are to investigate and prosecute. You can have a situation where a Swede is suspected of killing a Spaniard, off the coast of Morocco, owned by a British company, sailing under a Panamanian flag. In that scenario it would usually be Panama who would be responsible for investigating, even though they are thousands of miles apart.

3. The danger Lo faces at sea is heightened by her dependence on prescription medication. How did you research this aspect of Lo’s character?

I’m lucky that I know a few medics who were able to advise on likely dosages and types of treatment, but I also found message boards and forums invaluable for giving first hand insight into how different people react to withdrawal and so on.  

4. Without giving too much away, there’s a fairly elaborate scheme at the heart of this mystery. I’m curious about your process — how did you plot it all out? (e.g. did you write out the scheme in advance in post-it notes? Or did you work backwards and try to fill in the various questions logically as they arose?)

I had the basics of it plotted out – nothing elaborate like post-it notes, just an A4 outline of how the plot would pan out – but the ending surprised me and meant I had to go back and re-write a chunk of it to make it work! Mostly I work using a mix of the techniques you describe – I have the bones in place, but the fine details I work out on the hoof.

5. If you were a travel journalist like Lo, what would be your dream assignment and why?

I have always wanted to go to India or Thailand and I never have. So I would love to go somewhere beautiful and remote, and completely detach from everyday life. I’m also – contrary to how it may have come across in the book – a big fan of spa treatments. So throw in a massage or two, and I’d be in heaven!

Blog Tour Schedule

Check out the rest of the tour on the blogs below!

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Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for an advance reading copy in exchange for an honest review, and thank you to Ruth Ware for participating in this Q&A!

As a lifelong mystery fan, I was thrilled to discover the contemporary crime novel Smaller and Smaller Circles by Singapore-based Filipino author F.H. Batacan. The mystery is set in Payatas, Manila, Philippines, where Gus Saenz, a local Jesuit priest and forensic anthropologist, notices a pattern in murders of young boys over the past year. He raises the matter with the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI – the Philippine equivalent of the FBI) and investigates with the assistance of his friend and protegee Jerome Lucero, another Jesuit priest and a psychologist. I read a lot of crime fiction, but Smaller and Smaller Circles is the first contemporary police procedural-type mystery that I’ve read by a Filipino author, and I found it a fascinating glimpse into the investigative culture of Manila.

There are so many things I loved about this mystery. First, as I said, I love the glimpse into the detective culture of Manila. Having grown up there, I suppose I already knew some of the things mentioned in the book, particularly how crimes, even murders, are rarely given much police power unless the victim was someone wealthy. Still, Gus’ insight about serial killers was an eye opener for me — there aren’t really any stories of serial killers in the Philippines which may make one believe that serial killing just doesn’t happen in the country. (In this case, “serial killing” means in the Western sense of a series of murders committed by a single individual for personal motivations and outside of organized crime or political reasons.) But Gus points out that given how Philippine police doesn’t track statistics on missing persons and pads statistics on suspicious deaths, it’s possible that serial killings do occur; they’re just not being noticed.

I also loved the characters — I found the father/son dynamic between Gus and Jerome sweet, and the occasional glimpses into their pasts made me curious to learn more about them. I’ve often said that mystery series are made or broken on the strength of the lead detective/s, and while Smaller and Smaller Circles is a standalone, I’d definitely love to read more of Gus and Jerome’s cases. I also enjoyed seeing characters who are priests fulfilling secular roles, in this case as an anthropologist and a psychologist. I realize this is showing how little I know of the Catholic Church, but I didn’t realize priests could be professional scientists as well. I’d studied at a Jesuit university, and remember doing a double take the first time I saw a priest professor who walked into class without the white robe priests wear for Mass. (Prior to that, I’d studied at a school run by nuns, and all the nun teachers I saw wore their full habit, so I supposed I expected priests to do the same.) So it was pretty cool for me to read about priests performing autopsies and profiling serial killers. More than that, Gus and Jerome were just really strong characters, and it was fun to see them interact.

One can hardly have a mystery involving members of the Church without at least mentioning the elephant in the room — the accounts coming out of priests abusing children and the Vatican covering up the scandal rather than dealing with it. Batacan not only mentions it; she makes it a major subplot. Gus has been trying for years to get a predatory priest fired (defrocked?), but, due to some wealthy patrons, this priest instead becomes the head of a charity shelter for orphans and street children, giving him even more access to potential victims. This subplot runs parallel to the series of murders; Gus’ advocacy leads to some professional challenges for him, but more than that, the pattern of this priest’s continued stay in power mirrors the injustice that surrounds the murders themselves. In both cases, Gus must stand up against the victimization of those who are helpless to fight back.

The politics around the murder investigation were also really interesting. I enjoyed seeing the power dynamics between the members of the NBI, and the political machinations of various other characters. Batacan’s story may be full of indignation at the injustices of income inequality, but I like that she doesn’t simply make all the rich people bad guys. For example, a wealthy politician comes through at a pivotal moment, and a Manila socialite is clearly distressed when she has to cut funding for a good cause.

I read Smaller and Smaller Circles initially because I wanted to support Filipino writing and also because I was curious as such a book in Philippine literature seemed new and innovative to me. Now I’m glad I read it because it simply is a fantastic, well-written mystery with characters you’ll wish you had more time to get to know. I highly recommend it to mystery fans.

Movie Adaptation

I recently learned that it has been adapted into film! This isn’t much of a surprise to me as even while reading it, I kept thinking about how great it would translate to the screen (albeit hopefully with the more gruesome aspects edited out). I can’t seem to find a trailer online yet (here’s the Facebook page and Twitter account), and I don’t know if it’ll screen in North America (fingers crossed!), but if you live in the Philippines, do keep an eye out for it. I hear it’ll be released in 2017.

Where to Find It

I don’t often post links to retailers but, as I was initially afraid I’d have to wait until a trip to the Philippines to get a copy, I wanted to give my North American readers a heads up in case you think the same. Thankfully, Penguin Random House published the paperback in 2016, so I was thrilled to find copies fairly easily online at Indigo and Amazon.ca (the original 2002 edition by the University of the Philippines Press is a bit harder to find). And if you happen to live in Toronto, the Toronto Public Library also carries the ebook and the print book.