Tangled Web UK Review July 2007
The Coroner's Lunch by
Colin Cotterill
pbk out June 07
(Quercus)
at £12.99
An unusual, entertaining and informative novel sited in the last place and
time one would expect a crime story to be set – Laos in 1976. I had to
pull down an atlas to remind myself where the place was in relation to the
other bits of former French Indo-China.
The leading figure is Doctor Siri, an old medical practitioner who has
spent the last forty years with the Marxist rebels in the jungle, patching
up their wounds until at last they achieve independence, a year before the
story begins. Siri hoped for retirement, but the new bureaucracy demands
that he becomes the State's Chief (and only) Coroner/Pathologist, a
speciality about which he knows absolutely nothing. With the aid of an
old French textbook and the help of his Down's Syndrome mortuary
assistant and his departmental nurse, he muddles through in the primitive
conditions of the poorest nation in Asia. The title comes from the fact that
Siri and one of his old pals in the Comintern, go each day to the river
bank which faces the free and decadent Thailand, to eat their bread roll
and discuss the ways of the world.
A variety of corpses come his way, but three apparently tortured
Vientnamese discovered in a resevoir lead to an international conspiracy
which embroils the reluctant Siri. The characterisation is excellent, as is
the portrayal of an emerging totalitarian state which disappoints those
who fought for it for so long. The dialogue is witty and the story has a
brightness and optimism which belies the drab surroundings in which the
characters play out their parts.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
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