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  • The Coroner’s Lunch

  • The Dr. Siri Investigations, Book 1
  • By: Colin Cotterill
  • Narrated by: Clive Chafer
  • Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
  • 4.2 out of 5 stars (1,726 ratings)

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The Coroner’s Lunch

By: Colin Cotterill
Narrated by: Clive Chafer
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Publisher's summary

Laos, 1975: The Communist Pathet Lao has taken over this former French colony. Dr. Siri Paiboun, a 72-year-old Paris-trained doctor, is appointed national coroner. Although he has no training for the job, there is no one else: the rest of the educated class have fled.

He is expected to come up with the answers the party wants, but crafty and charming Dr. Siri is immune to bureaucratic pressure. At his age, he reasons, what can they do to him? And he knows he cannot fail the dead who come into his care without risk of incurring their boundless displeasure. Eternity could be a long time to have the spirits mad at you.

©2004 Colin Cotterill (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

“A wonderfully fresh and exotic mystery…If Cotterill…had done nothing more than treat us to Siri’s views on the dramatic, even comic crises that mark periods of government upheaval, his debut mystery would still be fascinating. But the multiple cases spread out on Siri’s examining table…are not cozy entertainments but substantial crimes that take us into the thick of political intrigue.” ( New York Times Book Review)

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Darkly Comic Mystery Set in Laos Post 1975

Dr Siri Paiboun became Coroner more or less by default. He is 72 years old and had spent most of his earlier years as a doctor treating soldiers injured in the struggle for Communism to take over the government. Now it has succeeded and the worker's utopia has been deserted for the most part by the wealthy and educated class. He has an antique microscope, a few chemicals, and a camera that has a very strictly limited amount of film that his investigations must share with the social events of the nurses. There's a government spy installed behind his mortuary who complains about the smell of the corpses and mystical experiences that interrupts his nights.

The reader was very good and I quite enjoyed listening to this book with it's convoluted plot and interesting background.

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