Colin Cotterill
- The Coroner's Lunch
- Thirty-Three Teeth (A Dr. Siri Paiboun Mystery Book 2)
- Disco for the Departed (Dr. Siri Mysteries Book 3)
- Anarchy and Old Dogs (Dr. Siri Mysteries Book 4)
- Curse of the Pogo Stick (Dr. Siri Mysteries Book 5)
- The Merry Misogynist (Dr. Siri Mysteries Book 6)
- Love Songs from a Shallow Grave (Dr. Siri Mysteries Book 7)
- Slash and Burn (Dr. Siri Mysteries Book 8)
- The Woman Who Wouldn't Die (Dr. Siri Mysteries Book 9)
- Six and a Half Deadly Sins (Dr. Siri Mysteries Book 10)
- I Shot the Buddha (A Dr. Siri Paiboun Mystery Book 11)
- The Rat Catchers' Olympics (A Dr. Siri Paiboun Mystery Book 12)
- Don't Eat Me (A Dr. Siri Paiboun Mystery Book 13)
- The Second Biggest Nothing (A Dr. Siri Paiboun Mystery Book 14)
- The Delightful Life of a Suicide Pilot (A Dr. Siri Paiboun Mystery Book 15)
Pages: 337
Pages: 304
Pages: 356
When a Lao female security officer is discovered stabbed through the heart with a fencing sword, Dr. Siri, the reluctant national coroner for the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos, is brought in to examine the body. Soon two other young women are found killed in the same unusual way. Siri learns that all three victims studied in Europe and that one of them was being pursued by a mysterious stalker. But before he can solve the case, he is whisked away to Cambodia on a diplomatic mission. Though on the surface the Khmer Rouge seem to be committed to the socialist cause, Siri soon learns the horrifying truth of the killing fields and finds himself thrown into prison. Can the seventy-four-year-old doctor escape with his life?
M B Fay on Amazon wrote:Colin Cotterill certainly does not follow a formula in constructing his excellent mysteries featuring Laotian septuagenarian coroner Dr. Siri Paiboun. This installment has two main threads, one which is told in the first-person, present tense by Siri who is imprisoned in Cambodia, and the other the mystery of three similar homicides that started before Siri’s trip with his friend Civilai to Cambodia, which is told in the third person and involves Siri and his menagerie of interesting colleagues and companions. The two stories come together as Siri thinks of the mystery back in Laos to distract himself from torture and mistreatment in Cambodia and as Inspector Phosy ponders Siri’s advice/concerns and pursues the case in his absence. A theme tying the two streams together is the bureaucratic investigation in Laos of whether Siri warrants official hero status while in Laos he is demonstrating, at least to the reader, that he definitely is a hero. Colin Cotterill is a delight as a writer because of the originality of each book as well as his continuing development of excellent characters and his witty description of their interactions and somewhat nonsensical events. Nevertheless, this book is dark in its telling of the brutality of the Khmer Rouge--a lesson worth remembering.
Not for the faint of heart
Of all the books in the Dr. Siri series, I think this one has been most on my mind. In the 1970's Pol Pot and his gang of marauders decimated the population of Cambodia and I was peripherally conscious of what was going on via the media. When reading this book, I was made painfully aware of the horrors of that genocide. This book hit me so intensely that I had to put it down every once in a while in order to digest the pain and get my head wrapped around what had happened. This book is not for the faint-hearted or the lovers of fairy tales in which everything is rosy in the end. Cotterill has done a stellar job of gripping this reader and not letting go. This is a do-not-miss read and I am still affected by it.
Colin Cotterill deserves many kudos for his amazing writing skills. So glad to have discovered this writer.
READ THIS BOOK!
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