Slash and Burn

The eighth installment in Colin Cotterill's bestselling mystery series starring the inimitable Lao national coroner, Dr. Siri Dr. Siri was 72 years old in 1974 when he was forced out of retirement and grudgingly became Laos's national coroner. Now he might finally be allowed to retire (again). Although he loves his two morgue assistants, he's never loved the job, and he wants to spend some time with his wife before his untimely death (which has been predicted by the local transvestite fortune teller). But retirement is not in the cards for Dr. Siri. He's dragged into one last job for the Lao government: supervising an excavation to find the remains of a US fighter pilot who went down in the remote northern Lao jungle ten years earlier. One member of the party is found dead, setting off a chain of accidents Dr. Siri suspects aren't completely accidental. Everyone is trapped in a cabin in the jungle, and the bodies start to pile up. Can Dr. Siri get to the bottom of the MIA pilot's mysterious story before the fortune teller's prediction comes true?

Colin Cotterill is the author of ten other books in the Dr. Siri Paiboun series, including The Coroner’s Lunch, Thirty-Three Teeth, Disco for the Departed, and Six and a Half Deadly Sins. His fiction has won a Dilys Award and a CWA Dagger in the Library. He lives in Chumphon, Thailand, with his wife and five deranged dogs.