Books Read in July 2023

I had a good reading month in July. No complaints at all. I noticed that I read no vintage mysteries at all, this month or in June. I guess that is because I chose only one of those for my 20 Books of Summer list, and mostly I have been sticking to that list.

And now to the seven books I read:

Nonfiction

The Book of Forgotten Authors (2017) by Christopher Fowler

This is a reread. I read this book first in October 2020, and read it again this year for the Bookish Books Reading Challenge, hosted by Susan  at Bloggin' About Books. Christopher Fowler was interested in finding out about forgotten authors, and wrote a column on that subject in a British newspaper for many years before this book was published. Fowler's essays are entertaining and opinionated, and this is a book well worth reading. 

Jane Austen Cover to Cover: 200 Years of Classic Book Covers (2014) by Margaret C. Sullivan

This book compiles two hundred years of book covers for Austin's six novels and her other writings. It cannot cover every edition ever published but with over 200 images it is very impressive. The book also includes historical commentary and Austen trivia. I also read this book for the Bookish Books Reading Challenge.

Historical Fiction

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2009) by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

This epistolary novel set in London and on Guernsey in 1946 depicts the German occupation of Guernsey during World War II from the eyes of the residents. This was another book I read for the Bookish Books Reading Challenge. My review is here.

Science Fiction / Alternate History

SS-GB (1979) by Len Deighton

SS-GB is an alternate history in which England has been invaded by Germany. Len Deighton is one of my favorite authors and I was not disappointed in this book. My review is here.

Crime Fiction

The Nature of the Beast (2016) by Louise Penny

This book is the 11th in the Armand Gamache series by Louise Penny, and is set in Three Pines, Quebec in Canada. I like these books no matter where they are set, but when they are in Three Pines, it means that some of my favorite characters will feature: Ruth, Clara, Olivier and Gabriel, and Myrna at the bookstore. My review is here.

Disco for the Departed (2007) Colin Cotterill

This is the 3rd book in the Dr. Siri Paiboun series. This series is especially interesting because of the setting: Laos, in 1977, when the Communists are in power. My review is here.

Murder Most Fowl (1994) by Bill Crider 

This is the seventh book in Bill Crider's longest running series, the Sheriff Dan Rhodes series. This one provides a picture of rural Texas in the 1990's. The series has 25 books total and the last book was published in 2019. My review is here.

Garden Plants in August 

The photos at the top of this post are of Tibouchina heteromalla (Silver leafed Princess Flower) plants in our front flower beds. We just started seeing purple blooms on the plants in the last week. The foliage is also lovely, all year round. 

The top photo immediately above is the red lantana that is planted beside the Princess Flower. Those plant started blooming in late July which seems awfully late to me. 

Directly above is a volunteer strawberry plant that somehow grew in a pot of our succulents out front.

Photos taken and processed by my husband. Click on the images for the best viewing quality.

Disco for the Departed: Colin Cotterill

This is the third book in the Dr. Siri Paiboun series and now there are 15 books total. This was my tenth book read for the 20 Books of Summer Challenge. 

This series is especially interesting because of the setting: Laos, in 1977, when the Communists are in power. Siri, in his seventies, has been named the national coroner of Laos. He has a small staff to help him in his work, Nurse Dtui and Mr. Geong. 

In Disco for the Departed, the Pathet Lao are signing a treaty with the Vietnamese. Siri and Dtui travel to a city far from their hospital in Vientiane to investigate a corpse, which was found embedded in concrete, with one arm sticking out of the concrete. On this trip, Dtui has the opportunity to do some real nursing in a very overcrowded, understaffed hospital and gets an offer of marriage.

Geung is left behind at the hospital in Ventiane. The official in charge, Judge Haeng, decides that Geung should be transported 200 miles away for other work. Geung doesn't understand why he has been relocated, he just knows he promised to take care of the morgue while the others are away. He manages to get separated from the soldiers who are transporting him and starts walking home, a seemingly impossible task. 

My thoughts:

Colin Cotterill writes with skill and humor. The subjects are serious but never dark and depressing. The characters are very well written. In this book I found the investigaton of the death less interesting, too complex, but in the end it had a very satisfying and surprising resolution. The plot includes many historical and cultural details about Laos and the surrounding areas.

I especially enjoyed the portion of the story where Geung attempts to return to the hospital in Ventiane. I was rooting for him to have a successful journey. Even though his mental abilities were limited, he found ways to use his talents to proceed in the right direction towards home.  

There are supernatural aspects to the story. From the beginning of the series, Siri has been able to communicate with the dead. In the previous story, he found out that he was a host to an ancient Hmong shaman. Normally I would find this offputting, but those elements do not take over the story. 

It had been 6 or 7 years since I read the 2nd book in the series but the author made it easy to pick up on where the characters were in their lives. I think this book would work as a standalone, but starting at the beginning would be even better. I hope I can read the books in this series more consistently in the future.

Colin Cotterill has a very amusing website.

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Publisher:   Soho Crime, 2007 (orig. publ. 2006)
Length:       248 pages
Format:      Trade paperback
Series:        Dr. Siri Paiboun
Setting:       Laos
Genre:        Historical Mystery
Source:      On my TBR since 2014.

Reading in September 2016

I cannot believe it is already October and only three more months left in the year. I do love this time of year. The promise of cooler weather coming (but not here yet for sure). Many holidays coming up. Veteran's Day, Thanksgiving holidays, and a long break between Christmas and New Year's Day.

In September I read seven books total. Two of the books were not crime fiction. The first book I read was a classic novel written for children, The Wind in the Willows. My first time reading it and I enjoyed it a lot.

The second book I read in September was also not crime fiction although it does have elements from that genre. Death Warmed Over by Kevin J. Anderson is mainly classified as a novel in the urban fantasy genre. The protagonist is a zombie who was formerly a private detective before becoming undead.

Then I moved on to straight crime fiction books:

The Diamond Feather by Helen Reilly

Helen Reilly wrote over 30 mystery novels between 1930 and 1962 and almost all of those were police procedurals featuring Inspector McKee.  This was her first Inspector McKee novel, and my favorite of the ones I have read so far.

A Deadly Thaw by Sarah Ward

This is Sarah Ward's second novel featuring Detective Inspector Francis Sadler and his team. It is a good police procedural, focusing as much on some of the people related to the crime as on the investigative team.

Thirty-Three Teeth by Colin Cotterill

Set in the 1970s. Dr. Siri Paiboun, a 72-year-old medical doctor in Laos has been appointed the national coroner under the new Communist regime. This is the second book in a series. Very enjoyable, but it was heavy on supernatural elements. 

Grifters & Swindlers edited by Cynthia Manson

A collection of 17 short stories taken from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. The stories all center on tricksters and con artists who are plotting to cheat someone of their money or valuables. The contents are variable, but there were several stories I liked a lot, and all were worth reading. The stories were published between 1950 and the late 1990s.

Quoth the Raven by Jane Haddam

This was a reread. Quoth the Raven is the 4th book in a long-running series about Gregor Demarkian, retired FBI agent, living in Philadelphia. I discovered this series in 2005 and read the first 20 books in three months. This one is set in rural Pennsylvania at a small college, where Gregor has been invited to give a lecture. Set around Halloween.

I have been participating in the R.I.P. event in September and continuing in October. That event celebrates reading of books of mystery, suspense, dark fantasy, and horror. All of the books listed above except for The Wind in the Willows -- which I finished in early September -- fit into that type of reading. Four were on my list of proposed books for the event. In October I have read two more: The Coffin Dancer by Jeffrey Deaver and Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers. And I am now reading another from the list: All the Lonely People by Martin Edwards. So that event has been good for motivating me to read several books that have been on my TBR stacks for years.

The Coroner's Lunch: Colin Cotterill

From the description at the publisher's site:

    Laos, 1975. The Communist Pathet Lao has taken over this former French colony. Dr. Siri Paiboun, a 72-year-old Paris-trained doctor, is appointed national coroner. Although he has no training for the job, there is no one else; the rest of the educated class has fled.
    He is expected to come up with the answers the party wants. But crafty and charming Dr.Siri is immune to bureaucratic pressure. At his age, he reasons, what can they do to him?

There are so many things to like about this book: the setting, the time period, the colorful and interesting characters. And, most important, the story is told well and with humor.

Dr. Siri Paiboon is a very unusual protagonist. Possibly because he is 72 years old, he doesn't take anything too seriously. He is also visited by the dead. His visitors are usually people that he has done autopsies on. They do not solve his crimes but they do motivate him to look beyond the obvious, and to be willing to circumvent the authorities to get the information he needs.

This first novel in the series opens in 1976, after Siri has been the unwilling coroner for one year. There are two cases that demand his attention. The wife of an important official has died and the official is pushing to speed up the autopsy. A Vietnamese body has been discovered and may have been tortured. And then he is sent to Hmong territory because of some suspicious deaths, although Dr. Siri suspects he is just being shunted off to keep him away from cases others want covered up.

Some quotes:

Despite having joined the Communist Party for entirely inappropriate reasons, Siri had been a paid-up member for forty-seven years. If the truth were to be told, he was a heathen of a communist. He’d come to believe two conflicting ideas with equal conviction: that communism was the only way man could be truly content; and that man, given his selfish ways, could never practice communism with any success. The natural product of these two views was that man could never be content. History, with its procession of disgruntled political idealists, tended to prove him right.

And a description of the morgue ...

The morgue at the end of 1976 was hardly better equipped than the meatworks behind the morning market. For his own butchery, Siri had blunt saws and knives, a bone cutter, and drills inherited from the French. He had his personal collection of more delicate scalpels and other instruments. There were one or two gauges and drips and pipettes and the like, but there was no laboratory. The closest was forty kilometers away, across the border in Udon Thani, and the border was closed to the dreaded communist hordes.

There was an old microscope Siri had requisitioned from the stores at Dong Dok pedagogical institute. If they ever reopened the science department, it would likely be missed. Even though the microscope was an ancient relic of bygone biologists and should have been in a museum, it still magnified beautifully. It was just that the slide photographs in his old textbooks were so blurred, he couldn’t always tell what he was looking for.

The inclusion of supernatural elements may deter some readers. My recommendation is to try the book anyway, because it has so much to offer in both entertainment value and education. I know very little about Laos at this time, and I learned a lot reading this. I have ordered the next few books in the series, and I hope to get to Thirty-Three Teeth, the 2nd book, in early 2015.

See reviews by Keishon at Yet Another Crime Fiction Blog, Maxine at Eurocrime, and Nan at Letters from a Hill Farm. And Margot at Confessions of a Mystery Novelist did a Spotlight post on this book.

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Publisher:   Soho Crime, 2004
Length:       257 pages
Format:       Trade Paperback
Series:        Dr. Siri Paiboun, #1
Setting:       Laos, 1976
Genre:        Mystery
Source:       I purchased my copy.