Tangled Web UK Review July 2008
Disco for the Departed by
Colin Cotterill
pbk out October 08
(Quercus)
at £6.99
This is the third delightful story in the series that began with The Coroner’s Lunch, which is currently short-listed for a CWA prize and was followed up with Thirty-Three Teeth.
Dr Siri Paiboun is the reluctant chief (and only) coroner in the People’s Republic of Laos soon after it gained power in the mid-1970s. Having tended wounded rebels in the jungle for the previous twenty years, he was dragged away from his anticipated retirement to become the only medical examiner in that impoverished country. His only assistants are a fat nurse Dtui and mortuary attendant Gueng, who has Down’s Syndrome.
A whimsical, engaging man of seventy-three, Dr Siri is also occupied by the spirit of a thousand-year old shaman and has the often-unwelcome gift of being able to converse with the dead!
The merit of these stories is their wit and their droll way of poking fun at a corrupt, inefficient bureaucratic communist administration which almost unwittingly came into power when a political vacuum appeared after the French and Americans lost interest in the country, leaving it at the mercy of the Vietnamese. Dr Siri, though a devoted communist, is well aware of the faults of the system and cunningly manages to weave his way through the problems. In this book, he is called to the mountainous north, where a National Monument has been set to commemorate the area which housed the rebels in the days of the insurrection, where they lived in caves and tunnels in the strange landscape. A body is discovered cemented into a new pathway to the President’s mansion and the ramifications take them into investigating the Cuban medical aid personnel.
The book is remarkable again for its very unusual locale , but mainly for the satire, wit and good humour that exudes from Dr Siri’s handling of the often bizarre circumstances.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
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