Dr. Siri Paiboun, the reluctant national coroner of the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos, is summoned to a remote area in the mountains of Huaphan province where for years the leaders of the current government have been hiding in caves, waiting to take power. Now, as a big celebration of the new regime is set to take place, an arm is found sticking out of a concrete walkway that has been paved from the president’s former cave hideout to his new home under the rocks. Dr. Siri is ordered to supervise the excavation of the body attached to the arm, to identify the corpse and find out how it died.
The autopsy reveals some surprises, but it is his gift as a shaman that allows the seventy-two-year-old doctor to discover why the victim was buried alive and, ultimately, to identify his killer.
This is the third of Colin Cotterill’s novels about Dr. Siri Paiboun, the agile and cunning seventy-year-old national coroner of the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos. It is also the most ambitious of the series, adding several layers of depth and seriousness to its relatively lighthearted predecessors.
The greys call to the northern mountains of Huafan Province, home to the legendary cave dwellings where the budding communists of Pathet Lao hung out during the overthrow of the Lao monarchy. A few days before the anniversary of the new red regime was celebrated, a mummified hand was found protruding from a broken concrete sidewalk slab in front of the president’s northern residence. Siri, along with the stalwart nurse Dtui, must identify the corpse and solve the mystery in time to prevent further embarrassment to Pathet Lao. Meanwhile, in the doctor’s absence, Siri’s loyal but retarded assistant at the morgue, Mr. Gyun, has been kidnapped from his beloved morgue and forced into a labor camp in the north.
As in all of Cotterill’s novels, Eastern mysticism plays a key role, and Siri’s ability to see and communicate with the dead comes in handy again as an excellent forensic tool. “Disco has a darker theme than Coroner’s Lunch or Thirty Three Teeth, mixing Caribbean black magic with Southeast Asian spiritualism while also delving into the horrors of war and the toll it takes on its unwitting and unsuspecting victims. While it is a bit more political than he mercifully avoided in his previous work, it is an intelligent and engaging read.