Inspired by the murder of a Japanese steel-pan player in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 2016, Passiontide begins like a police procedural, develops into a carnivalesque protest against femicide, and ends as a manifesto on civil disobedience and social justice. Monique Roffey’s follow-up to the Costa-winning The Mermaid of Black Conch is a mission-driven novel with an upfront political agenda.
Set in the fictional Caribbean island of St Colibri, the novel opens with the disembodied voice of Sora Tanaka, a 23-year-old Japanese pan player, recalling her violent murder under a sacred cannonball tree. Inspector Loveday, the half-hearted chief of Omwen (the Office for Murdered Women), swiftly arrives on the scene, and Roffey introduces a large and distinctive cast: British pathologist Jason Forrester; seasoned journalist Sharleen Sellier; the self-serving prime minister Errol Solomon and his domestically minded wife, Daisy; pink-haired “badass activist” Tara Kissoon; and the formidable Gigi Lala, founder of the Port Isabella Sex Workers Collective. They give Roffey a fertile, conflict-ridden ground for exploring law and order, politics, journalism and activism, though the book is distracted by too many peripheral characters.
