Innocence

The novel tracks Jai’s fall from the innocence of childhood and his introduction into the feral adult world of corruption and random violence. The boy Jai in happily taking on the task of solving the case of the missing children sets himself up as a detective, that is as a person able to solve mysteries, able to gather evidence and shape from it a reassuring sense of logic, causality, and order. Because he is only 9, he believes in that mission. He believes he will find his way to truth, that his diligent efforts interviewing families and working on hunches will be rewarded with the clarity of insight. He will find the killer. That assumption reflects the innocent world of a naïve child, fed by Jai’s endless viewings of police shows on television. Jai never perceives how difficult the task will be, indeed that...