Annika Character Analysis

Annika is the beautiful and talented violinist of the Canadian electronica band Baltica. Paul encounters Baltica while out at a club in Toronto in late 1999. He asks Annika out on a date, but she rejects him. Lonely and desperate to make friends, Paul offers Annika and Charlie Wu, the band’s keyboardist, ecstasy pills that made him sick the night before (Paul will later insist that he didn’t know the pills were bad—that he assumed he’d simply had a bad reaction to them), and the pills cause Charlie’s death. Later in the novel, the reader learns that Annika previously had worked with music producer and Alkaitis investor Lenny Xavier, though she ultimately abandoned Xavier and his production team to make music that was more closely aligned with her artistic values.