In fiction as in life, the disappearance of a child is usually an emergency situation. A public, unmitigated, universally understood catastrophe. Everything is mobilised: police, press, community. Everybody knows. Everybody cares. The most shocking thing about this graphic and disturbing crime novel is that very few know, and even fewer care. Smaller and Smaller Circles is set in 1997 in Payatas, the vast dumpsite quarter of Manila. The victims are boys in their early teens, killed, mutilated and left to fester in the dump. The killer has a strict timetable (one victim on the first Saturday of each month) and a distinctive method (too gruesome to describe here). Morse or Wexford would have it all tied up before lunch. But these boys among the trash are themselves trash: anonymous, disposa