The Merry Misogynist by Colin Cotterill review

Dr. Siri Paiboun is back in Colin Cotterill’s sixth book featuring the 73-year-old coroner. It’s set in Laos in the year 1978. It’s difficult struggling to survive under Communist rule, but Dr. Siri, his wife, the noodle-shop owner Madam Daeng, and other series regulars, like Nurse Dtui and his mentally challenged lab assistant, Mr. Geung, try to make the best of things. The good doctor has to conduct autopsies and determine the causes of death of the dead bodies brought to him with the limited tools and technology at his disposal, his keen intellect, and his spooky Ghost Whisperer-like supernatural visions of ghosts and premonitions of death.

In The Merry Misogynist, Dr. Siri is faced with bringing to justice the murderer of a beautiful young lady. She was found tied with ribbon to a tree, strangled to death. She also has a broken ring finger. At first, Dr. Siri suspects she was likely raped. While checking to discover signs of this, he finds something else, something that points out even more graphically what sort of a human monster he might be dealing with:

Buried deep inside the girl was a black pestle. It must have been inserted while she was still alive.

Through various sources, Dr. Siri hears rumors and stories of other women killed in similar ways that seem to match the M.O. of the killer he’s after. The readers know from the very first chapter that the murderer ultimately kills five women.  Dr Siri, however, has to arrive at this conclusion more laboriously, using his wits and the limited forensic tools he has available.

He may be 73, but the spry Siri is still gettin’ it done. He rides a Triumph motorcycle across the countryside in his search for clues and the murderer, who has traveled to a number of remote villages. Passes are required to travel from one police district to another, which is not much of a problem if you’re someone like a medical examiner or a government official. For anyone else, though, traveling from one town to another could be almost impossible. Dr. Siri wonders, how did the killer commit his heinous crimes, unless he was also some sort of important government official?

What I found very fascinating was how Siri manages to track down clues, sources, and witnesses, despite his country’s lack, at that time, of any centralized database about past crimes which could be cross-referenced. The police had mostly left or tried to change their identities after the present regime took over (and they’d kept very limited and lackluster records anyway), and soldiers had been acting as the police in many areas, which compounded the problems of trying to identify and tie similar cases together. While reading the novel, I often thought to myself he’s like a Laotian Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, though Dr. Siri, when he studied in Paris, imagined himself one day being more like Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret.  How Dr. Siri finds and connects related murders and finally tracks down the elusive misogynistic killer with the limited means at his disposal really makes the book special to me, and makes me want to go back and read the first five novels in the series.

Another aspect about the novel that I liked was that the readers are allowed to gain insights into the murderer’s character and motivations via reading his thoughts, past history, and actions in separate sections of the novel. While Dr. Siri is pretty much working blind, with only hunches, limited resources, and his own wits to guide him, we can see the inner workings of the killer’s psyche. Without revealing too much (hopefully), what I read in these sections reminded me of the Tooth Fairy in Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon and Buffalo Bill in his Silence of the Lambs.

Humor is also injected into the tale by the wonderful and warm relationships between Siri and his feisty wife and their friends in the rest of the novel, and in how they outwit minor Party bureaucrats. This is especially evident regarding his State-provided house and the motley group of tenants he’s allowed to live there, rent-free, while he and his wife live (in a completely different building) on the second floor above her noodle shop. Dr. Siri, by foregoing living in his Party-sanctioned house, and by allowing other people to stay there, has actually broken several laws. He’s done so because he is kind-hearted, and because he and his wife get a somewhat perverse pleasure from circumventing silly rules and laws and messing with petty bureaucrats’ heads.

The Merry Misogynist is a suspenseful, witty book that I would heartily recommend to everyone who loves the mystery genre. It initially attracted me because of the exotic locale, the idea of trying to track down a serial killer in a time and place where serial killers were practically unknown, and because of the age of Dr. Siri and his visions of ghosts. It’s a book I thoroughly enjoyed.

Cotterill has produced one novel a year featuring Dr. Siri – quite an accomplishment – and I, for one, am looking forward to many more novels in this series in the coming years. Dr. Siri’s age may play a factor in this, but I hope he has many more cases and adventures ahead of him before Cotterill decides to write about his last case.

Hardcover, August 2009 from SoHo Crime.