I hope you had a chance to pick up some great deals this weekend on Careful of Thy Wishes and other great deals. Some of them may still be available.
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules and more teasers at The Purple Booker. Anyone can play along.
Thirty-Three Teeth by Colin Cotterill is the second book that I have read in the Dr. Siri Paiboun Mystery series. (And though it is the second book in the series, the other one that I have read is actually #4, Anarchy and Old Dogs.) This mystery series is very different from any I have read before. It is steeped in the Lao setting and culture, with lots of fascinating plant names (like dog fart flowers and bull testicle trees), political red tape, and history.
Since the protagonist, Dr. Siri Paiboun, has been possessed by the spirit of an ancestor and has frequent encounters with the spirit world, there is a lot of Buddhist spiritualism as well. (If I have the terminology wrong, someone please correct me.) Dr. Siri Paiboun is the national coroner, and as such, he comes across some interesting deaths. However, in this post-communist-takeover era, he has only the most basic tools at his disposal and has to come up with some interesting methods of solving crimes.
She was constantly surprising him. Siri went over and held up Mr. A’s hand. All the fingertips were purple: triplicate syndrome.
Colin Cotterill, Thirty-Three Teeth
Dr. Siri Paiboun, one of the last doctors left in Laos after the Communist takeover, has been drafted to be national coroner. He is untrained for the job, but this independent seventy-two-year-old has an outstanding qualification for the role: curiosity. And he does not mind incurring the wrath of the party’s hierarchy as he unravels mysterious murders, because the spirits of the dead are on his side—and a little too close for comfort.
Dr. Siri performs autopsies and begins to solve the mysteries relating to a series of deaths by what seem to be bear bites, to explain why a government official ran at full speed through a seventh-story window and fell to his death, and to discover the origins of the two charred bodies from the crashed helicopter in the temple at Luang Prabang. As it turns out, not surprisingly, not all is peaceful and calm in the new Communist paradise of Laos.
