MEDIA REVIEWS

The Coroner’s Lunch

PBy Colin Cotterill
Soho Press, Inc, 257 pages, $24

Reviewed by Ann D. Zeigler

Here is a dilemma Houston-area lawyers will find interesting: What do you do when you are part of a criminal justice system in which you know scientific evidence is being manipulated to produce the verdict the government wants? Worse, what do you do when your first case involves the wife of a very senior member of the government, and your initial instructions are to lie about the cause of her death?
In Colin Cotterill’s debut novel, a retired general practice physician is appointed, over his protests, to be the state coroner of Laos. It is 1976 and the communists have just ousted the French colonial government of a small, poverty-stricken country sandwiched in between Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. The doctor, Siri Paiboun, has been a vaguely loyal communist (to please his now-deceased wife), but has never even seen an autopsy before. Now he has to fake his way through the procedures from old textbooks. But he is not inclined to falsify the autopsy report on Comrade Kham’s wife to suit the instructions of the prosecuting magistrate, an inept young political appointee. Dr. Siri has no equipment or supplies other than what he has in his own medical kit, and what he can politely lift from the remnants of the University’s science faculty. His staff consists of an ugly but ambitious receptionist and a mentally challenged but observant janitor.
Dr. Siri determines that the desired cause of death of the Party boss’s wife is not the real one. But before he can find out more, the body is whisked away and he is ordered to stop investigating and to “review” his report to confirm that the cause of death was “heart failure.” This would be the same cause of death as the fisherman whose legs were sheared off by a military patrol boat. And the same cause of death for three bodies found in a lake, who turn out to be members of a Vietnamese government delegation. Dr. Siri doesn’t buy into this, and puts his mind to the real facts when his boss won’t. After all, what is the down side of investigating—that he’ll lose the job he doesn’t want and have to return to retirement?
Colin Cotterill’s atmospheric novel takes elements from Asian literature as well as the European/American mystery genre. In Asian stories the fantastic or mystical element takes the place of the psychological element of intuition exercised by western detectives. Dr. Siri analyzes his dreams, in which the dead come to sit in the chair in his one tiny room in a boarding house, to speak about the events at the ends of their lives.
If you like excellent writing, set in an exotic location, with a large element of Eastern mysticism in the service of detection, Dr. Siri is your man.

Ann D. Zeigler is a bankruptcy lawyer at Hughes, Watters & Askanase, LLP, and an associate editor of The Houston Lawyer.

Suspicion of Rage

By Barbara Parker
Dutton, 375 pp, $24.95

Reviewed by ANN D. ZEIGLER

This is Barbara Parker’s tenth book, and eighth in the “Suspicion of” thriller series. The protagonists are Miami attorneys Anthony Quintana and Gail Connor Quintana. The newlyweds have taken a week-long break from their respective practices for a spur-of-the-moment trip to Havana (secretly, by way of Mexico) to attend the quinceanera (15th birthday) party for Anthony’s niece and to introduce Gail and her teenaged daughter, Karen, to Anthony’s Cuban relatives. Anthony is Cuban-born but American raised, and is a criminal defense attorney in other books in the series. Gail’s practice is not mentioned in this book, except to note that she managed on one week’s notice to get another lawyer in her building to cover her calendar briefly.
Suspicion of Rage is a blend of two stories. The main narrative involves Anthony’s brother-in-law, a Cuban general. This is the paranoia-laced thriller, with one strange event following another, or sometimes even stumbling over each other, and a wild string of nasty events overtaking the various characters. The sub-plot is the tangled story of a family split by international politics and Cuban economics. Laid over it all are Parker’s descriptions of Havana now, with everything crumbling, and people scrambling to get one more day out of cars, appliances, and businesses that should have failed completely many years ago, as seen through both Anthony’s eyes and Gail’s.
Lay aside any expectation that these characters will act like lawyers. They have both left their law licenses behind in Miami. But it is still a good weekend read.

Ann D. Zeigler is a bankruptcy lawyer at Hughes, Watters & Askanase, LLP, and a member of the editorial board of The Houston Lawyer.

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