Word: siris
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...apartment above the place. While living there, he got a first-hand look at the shocking dilapidation of the country's medical infrastructure. Years later, the experience would provide the inspiration for a series of charmingly offbeat mystery novels set in Laos and featuring a most unlikely detective: Dr. Siri Paiboun, the country's chief - and only - coroner...
...Siri certainly isn't your average gumshoe. For one thing, he's in his mid-70s, and feeling the weight of his years. But he does have a few advantages. He's able to commune with the spirits of the cadavers that pass through his morgue - "customers," as he calls them with characteristically mordant humor. And Dr. Siri is a cynic, naturally distrustful of the political cant mouthed by his communist-party superiors...
...fifth and latest Dr. Siri mystery, Curse of the Pogo Stick, is set in 1976, shortly after the communist takeover of Laos, and revolution is still very much in the air. The doctor, a former Pathet Lao guerilla who happens to have studied medicine in Paris, has been pressed, with much grumbling, into service as a coroner. Politics rudely intrudes when a body arrives in his morgue booby-trapped with a live grenade. Dr. Siri soon finds himself untangling a mystery involving Hmong insurgents, a possible demonic possession, and a plot by a female terrorist known as the Lizard...
...Originally a Londoner, Cotterill was working as an English teacher in Australia when he first became interested in Laos - meeting refugees who had fled the communist takeover. One man in particular, a former Cabinet minister in the royalist government, later suggested a model for Dr. Siri. "They were more than cynical," Cotterill says of the émigrés. "They were really angry to be forced to leave what was then a good life. They'd saved money, had careers and sent their children to good schools. Then the communists moved in and suddenly this lifestyle was taken from them...
...Siri Mole, Rua Francisco Otaviano 50 (021-2267-0894), is one of the best Bahian restaurants in town?and it has a very down-to-earth atmosphere. They serve mostly seafood, which is prepared in a traditional Bahian way and is some of the best I have tasted...