A blind retired dentist was hit by a logging truck on a street in Vientiane in front of the post office. His body was duly delivered to the morgue of Dr. Siri Paiboun, the official and only coroner in Laos. At the age of seventy-four, Dr. Siri is too old to be admired by the new communist bureaucrats he now works for. He recognizes the corpse, helped by a letter in the man’s pocket. But first he must decipher it; it is written in code and invisible ink. The dentist’s widow explains that the mysterious letters and numbers describe chess moves, but they are unlike any chess symbols Siri has seen before. With the help of his old friend Tsivilai, now a senior member of the Lao Politburo; Nurse Dtouy (“Fatty”); Phosy, a policeman; and Auntie Bpou, a drag queen fortune teller, Dr. Siri unravels the mystery of the note and breaks the plot to overthrow the Lao government.
A blind man who was killed in a bus accident carries an envelope with a seemingly blank piece of paper. Not only is it not empty, but it could have dire consequences for the country. Dr. Siri travels to a small village where the deputy governor has been electrocuted in his bathtub. Was it murder, suicide, accident, or murder? A little boy seems to have drowned, but his body looks unusual. Siri and his friends have to solve these problems.
Anarchy and Old Dogs grabs you from a very compelling start and you never think of stopping. His descriptions are poetic and evocative “The drought has squeezed every last tear of moisture from the sad land.”
His characters are unique and fascinating. Dr. Siri, a 73-year-old coroner, imagines himself as Georges Simenon’s protagonist, Inspector Maigret, and is sometimes called “Inspector Migren,” but when he solves the case in a very short time, “…he was still a little upset that he had not been given the opportunity to eliminate the suspects one by one through the magic of fingerprinting.” In this endeavor, he is accompanied by this friend Civilai and his faithful nurse Dtui.
One thing that makes this book particularly interesting is that there is very little of the supernatural element that was part of the previous books. There are fascinating descriptions of Siri’s dreams and the wonderful character of Auntie Bpu, a drag queen fortune teller. Siri and Civilai, whose origins we finally learn about, are much more introspective than in the past.
This is a more serious book about a period of history that I knew nothing about. I really appreciate that Cotterill doesn’t leave her reader confused, but rather