Mystery Review: Thirty-Three Teeth

I've been neglecting the writing and mystery side of this blog and decided to start incorporating the occasional mystery review. (Thanks to friend Evan Lewis for jabbing me in the ribs about this!)

I've just finished Thirty-Three Teeth by Colin Cotterill, Soho Crime, and I'm here to rave. This is the second in this series and is set in, of all places, Laos in the 1970's, not long after the Communists took over. Yes, it's got animal characters that qualify it for this blog, especially an old, abused Asian bear (non-spoiler: happy ending for bear).

I've been fascinated by Southeast Asia since my son lived in Cambodia (five long years) and a visit there in 2003, but I've never been to Laos. It's reputation among the ex-pats in Cambodia was that Laos was unspoiled, beautiful, and cheaper than Cambodia (and that's pretty darn cheap).

Thirty-Three Teeth pulls you into Laos without a trace of lecture or preaching: climate, geography, history, cultural conflicts, psychology, day-to-day living, and so on. The protagonist is the National Coroner, Dr. Siri, with supporting roles from his young female assistant, a policeman friend, a shaman, and a good many others. The plot is loosely-woven threads of untimely deaths, some of them connected, some not, all of them eventually deciphered by the good Dr. Siri and his friends.

Here's the remarkable thing. Thirty-Three Teeth is pure fun. The dialog made me laugh more than any mystery I've read in the last two years. The villains are corrupt bunglers, the heroes are tired, sweaty, smart, and kind. This is not a mystery full of clues with a tricky plot, nor is it a thriller about desperate CIA agents prepared to kill in the course of espionage. It is grounded in every day reality in a distant, strange land where spirits must be taken seriously, where people are figuring out what it means to live under an officious and ineffectual communist government, where scarcity is a way of life. And, somehow, it is delightful, smart, and open-hearted.

The first in the series is The Coroner's Lunch and there are four others.

Side note: Cotterill has a literacy project going for Laos. I can attest to the problems around kids' books in SE Asia. We tried to buy Khmer language comic books for my son's housekeeper. We finally found some in one of the two tiny bookstores in Phnom Penh. The pair cost the same as a week's salary for her, and she was well paid by local standards. A week's salary for two comic books? Yup. So kids aren't going to get reading material unless someone helps. Take a look at the link. A few dollars will go a long way.