I do love this series - hefty dose of woo woo notwithstanding. Possibly because the woo woo components just seem so culturally appropriate, but it could also be that Dr Siri is so wonderfully eccentric and fabulous you could forgive him a lot of things. The spiritual elements are, however, ramped up a lot in this book and it could be that this series would be best read in order, as the characters develop, and the relationship of Dr Siri and the spiritual world evolves.
From the Blurb:
Dr Siri Paiboun, the spry seventy-three-year-old reluctant national coroner of Laos, is out of town when a booby-trapped corpse is delivered to the morgue in Vientiane. The lives of visiting doctors, the morgue attendants, and Madame Daeng, Dr Siri's fiancée, are saved by the intervention of Nurse Drui, the doctor's longtime assistant, but it is a near thing. Who is responsible for this outrage?
Opening Lines:
As there were no longer any records, the Hmong could not even tell when they actually misplaced their history. The event had deleted itself.
Dr Siri Paiboun, the spry seventy-three-year-old reluctant national coroner of Laos, is out of town when a booby-trapped corpse is delivered to the morgue in Vientiane. The lives of visting doctors, the morgue attendant, and Madame Daeng, Dr Siri's fiancée, are saved by the intervention of Nurse Dtui, the doctor's longtime assistant, but it is a near thing. Who is responsible for this outrage?
On his way back from a Communist Party meeting in the north, Dr Siri is kidnapped by seven female Hmong villagers. The village elder had ordered them to bring Siri to him, hoping that Yeh Ming, the thousand-year-old shaman who shares the doctor's body, would consent to exorcise the headman's daughter.