Skip to main content

The Coroner’s Lunch by Colin Cotterill

Year of publication: 2004
No. in series: 1
Series detective: Dr. Siri Paiboun
Type of investigator: Coroner/doctor
Genre: Historical mystery
Type of mystery: Murder
Setting & time: The Lao People’s Democratic Republic; 1976

At age 72 and after a long service to the communist cause, Dr. Siri Paiboun had been looking forward to a nice retirement, but the newly installed authorities had other ideas and appointed him as the state coroner. With no experience of the work he is expected to do, no interest in the job and limited equipment, he tries to make the best of things, but it isn’t until a comrade’s wife dies mysteriously and the bodies of three dead Vietnamese soldiers turn up in a lake that things start to get interesting.

I think I have a new favourite detective. Dr. Siri is deliciously grumpy and sarcastic, but he also has the good detective’s curiosity and willingness to find out the truth no matter what, and combined with his healthy disrespect for authority this makes him a delightful character. The other characters are well-drawn as well, the book is funny and gruesome by turns, the descriptions of the Lao people and the country interesting and colourful,  and the supernatural elements add spicy note to the mix. It’s going on my keeper shelves. 4 stars.
Labels:

Comments

Dorte H said…
I also loved this one for the humour and the compelling character, Dr Siri.
November 04, 2010 3:02 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down
Post a Comment
Read more

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove
Post a Comment
Read more

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme
Post a Comment
Read more