Tangled Web UK Review December 2007
Thirty-Three Teeth by
Colin Cotterill
hbk out December 07
Published by Quercus
at £12.99
This is a very welcome follow-up to the author's The Coroner's Lunch,
bringing back his delightful cast of characters. Unusual locations seem to
be popular these days, such as Michael Walter's Mongolian detectives,
for Cotterill's books are set in Laos in the 1970s, soon after that country's
guerrillas succeeded in setting up their almost bankrupt Communist state.
The lead character is 72-year old Dr Siri Paiboun, who, after years of
hiding in the jungle, looks forward to retirement, but is forced into being
Laos's chief (and only) coroner/pathologist, a job he knows nothing
about. He is set up in a mortuary with a fat nurse and a Down's syndrome
autopsy assistant and told to get on with it.
Siri is a charming character, amiable and honourable, but disillusioned
with a revolution that rapidly slides into paralysing bureaucracy and
corruption. His two major advantages are having a friend in the Politburo
and the fact that he has the ability to see the spectres of dead people, as he
hosts the soul of a long dead Laotian mystic.
In this story, he meets the former King, who is in exiled disgrace and
discovers that like himself the Royal Family have thirty-three teeth, one
extra. The story-line is a little erratic and covers an escaped black bear who
is blamed for the horrid deaths of several women, but who is rescued by
a Russian circus performer, who bleaches some of its fur and passes it off
as a panda. A lot of Laotian legends seem to be interwoven and one needs
a suspension of disbelief in order to accept theidea of the spiritual help that Siri gets along
the way, but this is done is such a matter-of-fact way that it seems easy to
swallow. The finale is a quite exciting contest with a were-tiger in the
underground tunnels built by the guerrillas. There is a lot of mild sniping
at the idiocy of totalitarian regimes, control freaks being much the same
whether they be in Vientiane or Westminster, but this is a book which is
easy to read, entertaining and very witty – it also seems to be striking a
few covert blows against animal cruelty.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
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