This novel is like a cross between GK Chesteron's Father Brown mysteries and David Fincher's Se7en. I don't blame anyone who'd consider this an unforgivably facile and reductionist comment, but I've been grasping for a better way to describe the way FH Batacan is writing two different registers of the mystery novel and attempting to meld them in a single work. The reader is expected to reconcile the Latin-quoting, erudite Jesuit anthropologists Gus Saenz and Jerome Lucero with the frankly bile-churning descriptions of mutilated young boys that are left to rot amidst literal hills of garbage. There's a reason why the harrowing scene of a priest finding the body in Payatas is immediately followed by Father Saenz's sterile white and clean laboratory within the Ateneo de Manila premises. It's an audacious yet subtle juxtaposition of the pseudo-elevated life of the mind pursued by the Philippines' burgis class and the kind of criminal poverty that they (we) so carefully choose to unsee. 

The plotting itself follows familiar beats, and it bets less on the surprise whodunnit reveal and more on the inexorable unfolding of a tortured and torturing mind. This is the part where Se7en beats out Father Brown. When it was published by UP Press back in 2002 it was a mere sliver of a book, but the international version to be published by Soho Crime clocks in a 368 pages. Much of the real estate goes into creating a more substantial climax and denoument. I'm glad that this expansion does not lose Batacan's razor-sharp, journalistic writing and her knack for choosing the right details for more efficient devastation. Plus, she did away with that annoying patch of French dialogue in v1.0, which is an infinite win.

I don't think I can ever be objective about this novel, since I've formed a large part of my self-image around having loved its earliest iteration. My only takeaway is that I still loved it despite its familiarity, despite the weaknesses I see as a fan of the genre, despite the cruel distance imposed on it by time. Here's to hoping for its success leading to more books.

(It's really jarring as I read the review of some Westerners on Goodreads and Amazon, how they're pinging the story for its unrelenting depiction of gore, abject poverty, corrupt bureaucracy and I'm like... well.)