The fifth Dr. Siri Paiboun mystery
Seven female Hmong villagers kidnap Dr. Siri on orders from the village elder who hopes that Yeh Ming, the thousand-year-old shaman who shares the doctor’s body, will consent to exorcise the headman’s daughter. He fears that her soul has been possessed by a demon due to the curse of a mysterious Western artifact. Siri agrees to help and, in so doing, brings to pass a prediction of Auntie Bpoo,...

When a party official's wife turns up dead in Communist Laos, an elderly doctor becomes an unlikely detective in this engaging mystery.
Dr. Siri Paiboun, one of the last doctors left in Laos after the 1975 communist takeover, has been drafted to be national coroner. He is untrained for the job, but the independent seventy-two-year-old has an outstanding qualification for it: curiosity. And he doesn't mind incurring the wrath of the

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It's been a busy year for Alameda County Coroner's Deputy Clay Edison. He's solved a decades-old crime and redeemed an innocent man--earning himself a suspension in the process. Things are getting serious with his girlfriend. And his brother's fresh out of prison, bringing with him a great big basket of crazy. Then the call comes in the middle of the night. It's a bad one. A party in West Oakland. An argument with the neighbors. A crowd in the street....

A deadly fire reunites coroner Martha Gunn with Detective Inspector Alex Randall. When firemen are called to an intense blaze at the Grange in Melverley, they find the bodies of Christie Barton, her daughter, Adelaide, and father-in-law, William, along with evidence that suggests the fire was started deliberately. Detective Inspector Alex Randall enlists the help of coroner Martha Gunn, but the puzzle deepens with a second house fire - the occupant,...

"In her previous career as a nurse, Mattie Winston's job was to keep death at bay. Now, as a medicolegal investigator, she's required to study death intimately - to figure out causes and timing, and help deduce whether it was natural or suspicious. In the case of Montgomery "Monty" Dixon, a well-to-do realtor, there can be little doubt: broken pool cues do not embed themselves. Monty's body is found in the game room of his lavish house, the walls...

"Deputy coroner Clay Edison discovers that buried secrets can be deadly in this riveting thriller from a father-son team of bestselling authors who write "brilliant, page-turning fiction" (Stephen King). Deputy Coroner Clay Edison has his hands full. He's got a new baby who won't sleep. He's working the graveyard shift. And he's trying, for once, to mind his own business. Then comes the first call. Workers demolishing a local park have made a haunting...

"Laos, 1979: Retired coroner Siri Paiboun and his wife, Madame Daeng, have never been able to turn away a misfit. As a result, they share their small Vientiane house with an assortment of homeless people, mendicants, and oddballs. One of these oddballs is Noo, a Buddhist monk, who rides out on his bicycle one day and never comes back, leaving only a cryptic note in the refrigerator. Realizing that he needs rescuing, Siri and Daeng sneak illegally...

"It's 1743, and the tanners of Preston are a pariah community, plying their unwholesome trade beside a stretch of riverside marsh where many Prestonians by ancient right graze their livestock. When the body of a newborn child is found in one of their tanning pits, Cragg's inquiry falls foul of a cabal of merchants dead set on modernizing the town's economy and regarding the despised tanners--and Cragg's apparent championship of them--as obstacles...

"Blake continues the series Booklist calls "a solid winner" with a darkly rich mystery centered on an apparent suicide that leads Cragg and Fidelis down a treacherous path.The year is 1742, and the people of Preston are looking forward to their ancient once-every-twenty-years festival of merriment and excess, the Preston Guild. But the prospect darkens as the town plunges into a financial crisis caused by the death of pawnbroker and would-be banker...