In “Baile de Máscaras”, a new thriller by Lucas Pagani, the peaceful fictional town of São Filipe is shaken by a brutal murder at the local school. Writer Rui Córdova, who for 50 years tried to forget his teenage love, Vânia, sees his world fall apart when she unexpectedly reappears and is murdered during a graduation party. The big question is: who killed her and why?
Detective Diana leads the investigation, unearthing secrets buried for decades and revealing hidden rivalries among the city’s residents. The search for the killer’s identity reveals a complex web of lies that span generations, intertwining the characters’ lives in a plot full of twists and psychological depth.
The narrative alternates between past and present, exploring each character’s connection to the mystery. Rui, now a widower, was dealing with the pain of losing his wife Agnes, who died in an accident while pregnant after adopting an orphan, Galileo. Vânia, diagnosed with cancer, returns to the village to reveal a shocking truth to Rui, but is killed before she can. Among the suspects are Rui’s adopted son, the police officer’s boyfriend, a former student of Agnes and a famous singer, each with dark motivations. “Masquerade Ball” is not just a high school event, but a symbolism of the false appearances that dominate the city, where everyone hides secrets behind their masks.
What inspired you to write “Masquerade Ball” and how did the central idea of the plot come about?
In fact, there was no single inspiration. I often say that my characters took on a life of their own. As I created these people in my imagination over the course of 10 years, I did not have a central plot from the beginning, but subplots: the singer who moved away from her family for fame, the priest who had been orphaned as a child and adopted, the foreigner who came to Brazil, etc. Over time, I realized that it would be incredible to bring all these characters together in a common story. It was there that the fictional city of São Filipe was born. The murder during the masquerade ball was the catalyzing event of the police investigation that I intended to use as a driving force for the plot, in order to allow a delve into the personalities of these people and their families over the generations.
What was the process of creating the characters like, especially Rui Córdova and detective Diana? Was there a character that challenged you the most?
Some of the characters appeared in 2010, when I was in high school, during exercises in Writing classes. This is the case of Galileo, for example. Evidently, there have been developments and changes. Rui, initially, was a lawyer, not a writer, while Diana would be a journalist investigating the crime, not a police officer. Ângela appeared in 2015, when I was observing a stranger at a dinner, while Ramiro and Leninha were born in 2017 and the police officer Fábio was 100% invented at the time of writing. I would say, then, that creating characters is a multifaceted process, but most of them grew with me, so that I feel like I really know their personalities. Therefore, each person’s dialogues and actions emerged naturally and spontaneously as I wrote, because I knew how each person would behave in each scene, what they would think and feel.
The story of “Baile de Máscaras” takes place in the fictional city of São Filipe. Were you inspired by any real place to create this scenario?
Deliberately, no, but readers have already identified several similarities in the geographical description with my own city, Lages. Although this adaptation is neither intentional nor explicit, it is true that some clues in the description allow us to place São Filipe in the south of Brazil.
How do you balance the police investigation with the psychological depth of the characters in the plot?
It was challenging to “fill” the book. I had a beginning and an end, based on the emotional aspects and the journey I wanted to go through with each character, but I needed the action of the investigator Diana to move the plot forward, so I tried to place the chapters with more movement well, so as not to group a sequence very long chapters more focused on conversations. It is a fact that the initial part of the book has a lot of information to be assimilated until the reader becomes familiar with all the cores, but it was necessary to place all the pawns on the board and only then speed up the game. I didn’t want to open the book with the crime straight away, as I felt it necessary to provide some prior context about the past and the relationships of those characters with each other. The final stretch, with the climax, alternates several points of view in different scenes to culminate in the revelations that tie everything together.
What are your literary influences and how did they impact the writing of this novel?
I read a little bit of everything, from classics to children’s books, from detective novels to chronicles and so on. Certainly the type of detective and the whole element of the puzzle and the search for the killer come from names like Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle, but I also bring in the contemporary style of Raphael Montes. I must admit that there are traces, in the language, themes and chapter division, of authors such as Dan Brown and Harlan Coben, in the sense of combining a mystery with the alternation of focus between chapters, which move between different characters and locations.
The title “Masquerade Ball” has a symbolic meaning in the story. Can you tell us more about this?
There is a dialogue in the epilogue that will make the reader smile due to a metalanguage detail. Basically, as the protagonist is a writer, Rui, it was in his mouth that I put the explanation for the title. Of course, the title refers to the literal ball, in the middle of which Vânia is killed, but the book has a strong focus on the question of who we really are behind the “social mask”. Who do you imagine when you think of an octogenarian named Josefa, for example? How do you imagine a renowned doctor? And a priest? Because they and everyone else are much more than meets the eye. In addition to the title, this notion is also reinforced by the song “Appearances deceive”, which I used as an epigraph and is performed, in the story, by the character Natália, a singer.
The narrative of “Masked Ball” is full of twists and secrets. How did you plan and structure the suspense throughout the book?
It was necessary to create a “skeleton” of all the scenes that needed to be narrated and the order in which the events unfolded, so as not to create contradictions. Once this was done, it was easy to stitch together the clues that emerged in the witnesses’ testimonies and in the other events of the plot, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t necessary to research, rewrite, and discard sections. Great care was taken to ensure that there were no loose ends left, so every minimal comment has a reason for being that may go unnoticed on first reading, but it is there and has its contribution to the general understanding of the outcome.
Vânia returns to the village with the intention of revealing a shocking truth. How did you approach the topic of family secrets in your writing?
I think the idea is to show that everyone, in some way, has secrets. It can be something harmless or something really traumatic, something that embarrasses or something criminal, but the book seeks to explore the way in which choices have consequences for other people’s lives. When someone decides to omit something, it can be as harmful as someone who lies. The search for the culprit in Vânia’s death ends up revealing precisely this: no one is completely innocent and the role of victim is relative.
In addition to being a writer, you have a career in Journalism and Law. How did these experiences influence your approach to creating the book?
Journalism made me who I am today. When I wrote for the newspaper in print or online, or even the brief radio bulletins when I went live, my concern was that the text was understood, but also interesting. I have always put myself in the reader’s shoes, so moving on to literature made me improve the exercise of writing what I would like to read and the way I would like to read it. Contact with the legal world broadened my horizons in several ways. As I have been working in family law for around eight years, I have a lot of stories to tell, but I also have some experience, although more limited, with criminal matters, for example. Everything, in one way or another, is incorporated into the construction of my background, which certainly reflects on my writing style and the themes I work on.
“Masked Ball” is his debut novel. What are your future plans as a writer and are there any new projects in the works that you can share with us?
I really want to continue writing, but my current routine, with two young daughters, doesn’t allow me the dedication that a book requires. Still, the ideas don’t stop boiling and the drafts are always growing. I have a new thriller in the same universe as “Masked Ball” in mind, but it would be an independent story, with some elements already written and perhaps delving into something that was left out of the first book. In addition to this project, I’m working on a story about a couple that starts romantically and ends tragically. I needed to take a break from the frenetic pace, but I console myself by remembering that, between the first idea and the final point of the epilogue, “Masked Ball” had 10 years to mature, so it’s just a matter of time, but I know that my characters don’t make me happy. They will let me rest until I tell the world the stories they beg me to tell.
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