I read a lot of crime but I’d not particularly paid attention to Sri Lankan crime fiction until recently. I’m not sure what could be said to constitute it, really, in English-language novels—there’s that Ondaatje novel I haven’t read, maybe Shehan Karunatilaka? Meanwhile, googling this unfortunate question has led me to a white British writer who visited Sri Lanka in 2015 and promptly decided to write a colonial murder mystery series set in 1930s Ceylon and is now some eight books deep into this … thing. I shall do them the great and unearned courtesy of not speaking of this further.

Carmel Miranda’s Crossmatch is the most recent Gratiaen Prize winner—Visakesa Chandrasekaram (whose science fiction novel I must write about sometime) read a poem by Ahnaf Jazeem at the online ceremony, which I appreciated. I don’t generally read in that Gratiaen-y space (being somewhat removed from Sri Lankan literary culture) but I was intrigued that this seemed to be a straight-up genre novel. And in fact it’s two mysteries at once: the first, which works reasonably well, where a medical student, through a combination of happenstance and curiosity, uncovers a very middle-class conspiracy of black market organ trafficking; and the second a rather off-the-shelf scaffolding of confused parentage and overly foreshadowed secret baby swapping, which it could have rather done without. The strength of the book is in the fascinating window into med student life in Colombo, and in its willingness to be precise about the damaged human body. I wish it had leaned more into the body horror that it might have aspired to, and less into the soap opera of whose child is which.

As an entertaining counterpoint, the question of whose-child-is-which is also the main engine of Amanda Jayatissa’s My Sweet Girl , but here, at least, is a story with a clearer grasp of its own nature, which is to say, the book is not shy about its horror, with doppelgangers, creepy children, infinitely creepier adults, the dual terrors of orphanage and adoption, a classic Mohini haunting and a gothic mad attic wife situation to boot. The orphanage setting in particular is beautifully ominous, and I enjoyed the code-switching between San Francisco and Ratmalana Englishes. The adult narrator is delightfully awful, just a huge dick and in no way an ingénue, and for me this compensates for the mystery being not all that mysterious. If I wanted something more from this one, it was for a slower, denser prose that spent more time on its many horrors. But ultimately, what this is is a slasher, and it’s paced like one. Having recently attended the Stephen Graham Jones school of Final Girl appreciation, I enjoyed the one we got here quite a lot, even after having seen it coming.