Rating: 3.75* of fiveThe Publisher Says: Dr. Siri Paiboun, reluctant national coroner of the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos, is summoned to a remote location in the mountains of Huaphan Province, where for years the leaders of the current government had hidden out in caves, waiting to assume power. Now, as a major celebration of the new regime is scheduled to take place, an arm is found protruding from the concrete walk that had been laid from the President’s former cave hideout to his new house beneath the cliffs. Dr. Siri is ordered to supervise the disinterment of the body attached to the arm, identify the corpse and discover how he died.The autopsy provides some surprises but it is his gift as a shaman that enables the seventy-two-year old doctor to discover why the victim was buried alive and, eventually, the identity of his killer.My Review: Comrade Doctor Siri, the only coroner in the newly “liberated” Communist regime of Laos, returns to the northeastern jungle caves where he and his Pathet Lao insurgent comrades once fought the Royalists and the Americans for control of Laos. His purpose: Find out, in the ten days before a celebratory concert takes place there, whose body has been discovered in the newly laid cement walkway leading to the president's former hideout. Formidable Nurse Dtui in tow, Dr. Siri uncovers a series of awful, painful truths about families, friends, and the departed but not gone spirits of those who (willingly or not) gave their lives for the cause of communism.Along the way, Dr. Siri encounters an old Cuban friend from insurgency days, a host of disco-dancing spirits, a Lao cadre with the personality of a rock and the temerity to file a request for permission to woo before approaching Dtui to ask for her hand in marriage, becomes the living host of a different, dead Cuban, and unknowingly loses his eidetically gifted, Down's syndrome afflicted morgue assistant Mr. Geung, who contracts dengue fever (often fatal) in an epic walk across most of Laos to get back from his politically motivated exile from Vientiane's—indeed Laos's—only morgue at the hands of insufferable idiot politico Judge Haeng.When triumphant Siri and Dtui host an official delegation from Vietnam, their delightful antics offer an ending to this entry in the long-running series that should, if you're at all a fan of the comedy of cosmic justice, have you chortling with appreciative schadenfreude for hours.In any series, there comes a point when things either get stale or take some sort of turn that's got long-range implications and bends the course of future events. The latter point has been reached in this series, here in the third book, and there are some characters not present who would ordinarily be on-scene. Comrade Inspector Phosy is completely absent; Comrade Minister Civilai is only a token presence; but they will be back. Won't they? I haven't read the next book yet, so I can't be sure, but they should...and Dtui, bless her cotton socks, not only gets a marriage proposal (rejected) but other life-changing news (good) that will make the rest of the series look a little different.Series mysteries appeal to me for these reasons, these ongoing characters having ongoing lives that change the way things transpire in the books. I am, I suppose, the soap-opera-watching sort of personality. I like getting to know the characters in my entertainments over time, and watching them develop as logically as fictional characters can. Which is often a great deal more logically than corporeal characters can, or at least do, develop. And of course there is the orderliness of bad people being punished for doing bad things aspect of mysteries that's very appealing. It happens so seldom in life.Cotterill's Laos has the virtue of being completely unfamiliar to me, and therefore adding a (possibly spurious) sense of learning something about an alien life-way. I found the expanded knowledge of Laotian communitarian culture very interesting in this book. The moments that Mr. Geung, walking across most of his country, spends in the care of his countrymen are charming to me, revealing a place and a time that valued humanness and kindness over and above any -ism or credo. Cotterill is at pains to point out that the cities might already be changing, but the populace still valued and followed the ancient principles of hospitality and generosity to others.A deeply involving series, an interesting entry in it, and a story that both wraps itself up sensibly and satisfyingly as well as sets up the changes and events of the next entry...what more can a mystery addict ask for? This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
It is 1977. Dr. Siri Paiboun, the former Pathet Lao revolutionary and now reluctant national coroner of the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos, has again been summoned to a remote part of his country to look at a dead body. This time it is a body - an arm anyway - that is protruding from a recently built concrete walk that leads from the President's former cave hideout to his new house. Dr. Siri's task is to disinter the arm, see if there is a body attached, and find out how the body died and how it got into the wet cement. Dr. Siri has taken his assistant Nurse Dtui with him on the trip to help in his investigation. They have left Mr. Geung, their mildly Down Syndrome-afflicted helper at the morgue in Vientiane, to take care of things while they are gone. Unfortunately, one of Siri's enemies in the Justice Ministry sees Geung as an embarrassment and a liability and he takes the opportunity of Siri's absence to have him kidnapped by the military and sent to the north for "re-education."Meanwhile, Siri and Dtui get the body out of the concrete and perform the autopsy which only deepens the mystery of the death and how the body got there. But Siri is not only a surgeon and a coroner. He is also a shaman who embodies the spirit of a thousand-year-old Hmong shaman and is visited by the spirits of the dead who often lead him to the answers to questions of how they died. Soon he suspects that the spirit from this newly discovered body is with him and is trying to communicate something to him.Cotterill manages to weave a lot of cultural information into these stories. This time, he explores further a theme from the previous books, mainly the enmity and distrust between putative allies Laos and Vietnam and the racial/cultural prejudice against the Hmong people in Laos and the Montagnards of Vietnam. Also, in this book, the Cubans who have been sent to Laos to help with the rebuilding of the country play a significant role. I was particularly interested in the story line of Geung, his loyalty to his friends and his job, and his single-minded obsession to return to Vientiane and take care of the morgue as he had promised Dr. Siri that he would. He is just a lovely character and I did enjoy reading about him.All three of the main characters in these books, Siri, Dtui, and Geung are so compassionate, sympathetic, and humane and so full of humor that one feels comfortable in their presence. There's never really any doubt that the brilliant and intuitive Dr. Siri will get to the bottom of any mystery presented to him and that he will find a way to thwart the paper- and ideology-obsessed bureaucracy of his newly-Communist country. Nor is there any doubt that he will find a way to avenge his wronged friends. I want Dr. Siri to be my boss.
Do You like book Disco For The Departed (2006)?
Dr. Siri Paiboun, our favorite Laotian coroner returns. It’s 1977 and this time he is summoned to northern Laos, to investigate a body, buried in cement and joining him on this trip is his faithful nurse Dtui. The mystery in this story, however well it unravels, is secondary to these wonderful characters. They are smart and witty and oh so engaging.There is also just the right amount of eastern mysticism , with Siri having the gift of “vision” and being able to speak with the dearly departed. This leads to one of my absolute favorite scenes, involving Siri, a shuttered disco and the discovery of dance. I still break into a smile thinking about it.If you haven’t tried this series, do yourself a big favor and track these books down.BTW- I did not know you could eat bats and they taste like duck!
—Mark
Disco for the Departed is the third book in the Dr Siri series. It is described on its cover as having ‘comic charm’ and I wouldn’t disagree. Whilst I only laughed out loud a couple of times, I found myself often smiling along to the story and its understated and sly wit. In Siri, Dtui and Mr Geung, Cotterill has fashioned three well drawn characters which are not only very likeable but wholly believable, and the supporting cast were also well depicted. The story is well crafted and plotted, rich in detail and insights, and snakes and twists to a satisfying end. In particular, Cotterill does a good job of setting out the history and geography of Laos in the 1970s without this contextual material swamping or detracting from the story. It is also to his credit that I never once questioned Siri’s shaman abilities; instead I simply accepted it at face value that he could interact with the spirit world. All in all, Disco for the Departed was a very pleasant read and I look forward to reading more of Siri, Dtui and Mr Geung’s adventures.
—Rob Kitchin
Audiobook-Rezension:In Totentanz für Dr. Siri lässt Colin Cotterill seinen laotischen Leichenbeschauer und dessen Assistentin Dtui in der Provinz Houaphan, einer abgelegenen Bergregion, ermitteln. Nach einem Erdrutsch ragt ein mumifizierter Arm aus einem Betonpfad. Dr. Siri soll herausfinden, wie der Mann zu Tode gekommen ist, denn fraglicher Betonpfad führt zum Präsidentendomizil.Bei den Ermittlungen, in denen es immer weitreichendere Verwicklungen mit Familiengeschichten, Intrigen und kubanischer dunkler Magie gibt, lässt sich Dr. Siri von der Geisterwelt leiten, zu der er seit dem vorangegangenen Band eine tiefe Verbindung hat, da er von einem alten Schamanen besessen ist bzw. seinen Körper mit diesem teilt. Das mutet interessanterweise nicht ganz so schräg an, wie es zunächst klingt, denn Siri nimmt dies - wie auch die üblichen Ecken und Kanten seines Heimatlandes und dessen Bewohner - mit einer großen Portion Humor. Er nimmt sich, den Fall und die beteiligten Geister nicht zu ernst. Und so gelingt dieser außergewöhnliche Genre-Clash von Thriller und Mystery. Zusammen mit Jan Josef Liefers Lesung führt dies zu einem lustig-spannenden Hörvergnügen, bei dem der tatsächliche Kriminalfall wohl eigentlich eine untergeordnete Rolle spielt.
—Inga
