Smaller and Smaller Circles
Encyclopedia
Smaller and Smaller Circles is a mystery novel by Filipino
Filipino people
The Filipino people or Filipinos are an Austronesian ethnic group native to the islands of the Philippines. There are about 92 million Filipinos in the Philippines, and about 11 million living outside the Philippines ....

 novelist F. H. Batacan. It won the Carlos Palanca Grand Prize for the English Novel in 1999. It also won the National Book Award
Philippine National Book Awards
The Philippine National Book Awards, or simply the National Book Awards, is a Philippine literary award sponsored by the NBDB and the MCC . It is the national book award of the Philippines...

 2002 and Madrigal-Gonzalez Award 2003.

The book was the first Filipino crime novel. This novel was published in 2002 by the University of the Philippines Press
University of the Philippines Press
The University of the Philippines Press is the official publishing house for all constituent units of the U.P. system, and is the first university press in the country...

 as one of the first new fiction works they had selected. Although most Filipino English-language fiction works garner a single print run of only 1,000 copies, Smaller and Smaller Circles was reprinted four times, for a total of 6,000 copies.

Plot summary

Its main protagonists are Gus Saenz and Jerome Lucero, Jesuit priests who also perform forensic work. The mystery revolves around the murders of young boys in a poor region of Payatas
Payatas
Payatas is a barangay located in the 2nd district of Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines. Nearby barangays are Commonwealth, Batasan Hills and Bagong Silangan....

, Philippines
Philippines
The Philippines , officially known as the Republic of the Philippines , is a country in Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean. To its north across the Luzon Strait lies Taiwan. West across the South China Sea sits Vietnam...

.

Themes

In an unusual twist on the crime fiction stereotype, readers know the identity of the criminal.

A recurring theme in the novel is the inefficiency of the National Bureau of Investigation. Gus and Jerome, together with their ally reporter Joanna Bonifacio, take matters into their own hands and solve the mystery of the serial killings in Payatas.
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