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Praise for Colin Cotterill:
“[A] series of terrifically beguiling detective novels steeped in local color and history.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A delightfully fresh and eccentric hero.”—John Burdett
“Unpredictable. . . . Tragically funny and magically sublime.”—Entertainment Weekly
“A crack storyteller and an impressive guide to a little-known culture.”—The Washington Post Book World
“This witty and unusual series just keeps getting better.”—Publishers Weekly
“Delightul. A wry, eccentric addition to the genre.”—Booklist (starred review)
Dr. Siri is confronted with a deadly Casanova targeting lovely young women.
In poverty-stricken 1978 Laos, a man with a truck from the city was “somebody,” a catch for even the prettiest village virgin. The corpse of one of these bucolic beauties turns up in Dr. Siri’s morgue and his curiosity is piqued. The victim was tied to a tree and strangled but she had not, as the doctor had expected, been raped, although her flesh had been torn. And though the victim had clear, pale skin over most of her body, her hands and feet were gnarled, callused, and blistered.
On a trip to the hinterlands, Siri discovers that the beautiful female corpse bound to a tree has already risen to the status of a rural myth. This has happened many times before. He sets out to investigate this unprecedented phenomenon—a serial killer in peaceful Buddhist Laos—only to discover when he has identified the murderer that not only pretty maidens are at risk. Seventy-three-year-old coroners can be victims, too.
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By M. Boult (Australia)
I love Dr Siri Paiboun, irascible elder, coroner and detective. Colin Cotterill paints his characters with love and humour whilst providing a superb view of life in Laos in the 1970s. In this latest installment Siri is married and his wife is as strong and pleasing a character as he. All the characters are beautifully drawn and two stories are woven through the text. It is such a pleasure to read these books, I can only hope that the next book will be out soon.
By Blue (Washington, DC United States)
Author Colin Cotterill's highly original Dr. Siri Paiboun series takes the reader to Laos of the 1970s, where an exhausted population is trying to restart normal life after an long civil war that has brought an ill-equipped Communist Party to power. Siri Paiboun is a physician who spent the war years with the Communist side operating hospitals out of caves and forests. The new government has made him the country's National Coroner. In the that position, the aging and more than slightly politically disillusioned doctor has become a criminal investigator--largely because dead bodies keep arriving at his morgue under the strangest of circumstances.
In the latest installment of this wonderfully inventive crime saga, Dr. Siri, joined by his new wife, Madame Daeng, and other colorful colleagues, resolves to solve the murder of beautiful young woman that eventually proves to be the the work of a serial killer. At the same time Siri has other problems to resolve which include the disappearance of a brilliant homeless man and bureaucratic harassment over the motley population living in his officially allotted villa.
The murder investigation is as tightly written and original as any you will find in modern mystery writing and leads to an "ah ha" moment that you do not see coming. The trail to denouement is extremely clever and respects the reader's intelligence all the way. But the best part of this book--and its precedessors--is the presentation of the characters who are uniformly well developed and interesting. There is great wit and compassion in these stories and rarely a false note in their telling.
I haven't read all of the Siri stories yet, but enough to discern a growing strength in Colin Cotterill's writing skills that makes me hanker for the next book in the series. It is bound to be a good one.
By S. Turner (Seattle)
My husband and I anxiously await for each volume of the Dr. Siri Paiboun books. They are humorous and entertaining to read. It is interesting to learn about Laos after the communist take over. Very well written and thought provoking.
By Sandra S. Ansley (Warwick, New York United States)
This is a delightful book by Colin Cotterill. The plot is interesting and engaging and the characters are delightful and well drawn. It gave me a glimpse into a part of Asia I did not know anything about.
By Gary Griffiths (Los Altos Hills, CA United States)
Like the Laotian septuagenarian protagonist Dr. Siri Paiboun, this is a series that isn't getting older, just better. And, with "The Merry Misogynist", darker.
The corpse of a beautiful teenage girl shows up in Dr. Siri's morgue, found bound to a tree and strangled with pink ribbon. The condition of the body defies logical explanation, while even deeper mysteries await Siri's autopsy tools. Following some rudimentary investigation, the Columbo-like coroner concludes the poor girl's fate is not an isolated incident, but the grisly work of a serial killer undiscovered for over a decade.
In contrast to the more somber, "Silence of the Lambs-like" tone of this installment, Colin Cotterill's dialog, always snappy and cynically humorous, reaches new levels as Siri, with his elderly but equally spry new bride Madam Daeng, spars in rich and playful verbal combat - nearly a Southeast Asian version of Joe Lansdale's Hap and Leonard. Cotterill will never disappoint in atmosphere and culture, and again brings a vibrant but forgotten Laos to life, the setting playing as important a role as the finely drawn characters and twisting plot of this little gem. His wry observations of life in a soulless Communist state, sucked colorless by socialism's silly tyrannies masquerading as equality, should sober even the most idealist liberal ("...how wonderful it was to live in a state where the actual person was no longer important.") But Cotterill's goal is not to preach politics, simply to entertain, and he succeeds with honors, spinning a fine balance between mystery, humor, and setting, spinning in enough suspense zigs and a Hitchcockian zags to keep the pages turning.
Colin Cotterill is a talented author, and his "Dr. Siri" series is arguably the freshest, most interesting new fiction to hit the shelves this century. It is a shame that writing and storytelling of this quality remains mostly undiscovered literature - one can hope the author and his canny Laotian coroner will eventually get the recognition they deserve.
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