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The coroner's lunch / Colin Cotterill.

by Cotterill, Colin.

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Soho Press, c2004.

Older people -- Fiction.

Physicians -- Fiction.

Coroners -- Fiction.

Laos -- Fiction.

Cotterill, Colin. Dr. Siri Paiboun mysteries ; 1.

9781616956493 (pbk)

9781569474181 (trade pbk.)

9781569473764 (alk. paper)

1569473765 (alk. paper)

257 p. ; 20 cm.

The Coroner's Lunch is set in Laos in 1976. The main character is 72-year-old Dr. Siri Paiboun, the country's only government coroner. Siri is a grumpy, outwardly cynical curmudgeon who sees strange things in his dreams. Decades earlier he had joined the Pathet Lao, less out of ideological conviction than because he had fallen in love with a true believer. That wife is now dead, and Siri, having spent much of his career practicing medicine in the jungle, lives alone in a one-room Vientiane apartment and presides over a primitive morgue. There he's assisted by a nurse who buries herself in Thai movie magazines and a young man with Down syndrome. Siri doesn't bother to hide his contempt for party hacks like his boss, Judge Haeng, the "spotty faced magistrate." He would be only too happy if party honchos kicked him out of office and into retirement. When the body of a senior party member's wife arrives at the morgue, Siri only reluctantly surrenders it to the woman's husband, who seems powerfully interested in getting it quickly to the crematorium. The other plot involves three Vietnamese officials whom we meet on the first page of the book as they plunge from a helicopter into a Laotian lake, their feet tied to rusty bombshells. Their deaths are apparently part of a scheme to foment war between Laos and Vietnam. The case is political dynamite.

Mystery fiction.

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