Filipino journalist F.H. Batacan's Philippine National Book Award-winning debut, Smaller and Smaller Circles, is widely regarded as the first Philippine crime novel. All manner of crimes--corruption, assault, murder--along with everyday injustice, haunt Accidents Happen, Batacan's magnificent, searing collection of 11 partially linked stories.
At least three irresistible recurring characters are ready for standalone titles of their own. The trio--police officer Mike Rueda, journalist Joanna "Joe" Bonifacio, Father Augusto Saenz--make their collective debut in "No. 1 Pencil," which opens with a woman's corpse at the bottom of the stairs. Rueda needs Joe to connect him to Father Gus--a full-time priest and part-time forensic anthropologist--to figure out how the young, silent stepdaughter who lives in the "dark, narrow, musty room beneath the stairs" didn't do it.
Beyond murder, Batacan is particularly adept at inserting unexpected, disturbing relationships among the living. A lonely professor begins to care for--and becomes righteously attached to--a neighbor who uses a wheelchair and whose much-younger wife seems to blithely neglect him in "Door 59." "Easy, white men" prove to be "transparent... predictable" targets for the narrator in "Harvest" for work she must do to keep her six-year-old daughter safe.
Batacan is a gloriously sly writer, never allowing complacency to simplify her narratives. Amid rising body counts and unpunished infractions, she occasionally assumes the role of both judge and executioner, adroitly inserting necessary, satisfying consequences--as with a specialty knife able to exact deserving vengeance on cheaters in "The Gyutou." Machinations and manipulations couldn't be more welcome. Audiences will only want more, more, more. --Terry Hong