Tag Archives: Books

In My Hands Today

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Disco for the Departed (Dr. Siri Paiboun #3) – Colin Cotterill

Dr. Siri Paiboun, reluctant national coroner of the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos, is summoned to a remote location in the mountains of Huaphan Province, where for years the leaders of the current government had hidden out in caves, waiting to assume power. Now, as a major celebration of the new regime is scheduled to take place, an arm is found protruding from the concrete walk that had been laid from the President’s former cave hideout to his new house beneath the cliffs. Dr. Siri is ordered to supervise the disinterment of the body attached to the arm, identify the corpse and discover how he died.

The autopsy provides some surprises but it is his gift as a shaman that enables the seventy-two-year old doctor to discover why the victim was buried alive and, eventually, the identity of his killer.

Dr. Siri Paiboun Series:

  • Book 1: The Coroner’s Lunch
  • Book 2: Thirty-Three Teeth

In My Hands Today…

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The Godfather of Kathmandu – John Burdett

Sonchai Jitpleecheep–John Burdett’s inimitable Royal Thai Police detective with the hard-bitten demeanor and the Buddhist soul–is summoned to the most shocking and intriguing crime scene of his career. Solving the murder could mean a promotion, but Sonchai, reeling from a personal tragedy, is more interested in Tietsin, an exiled Tibetan lama based in Kathmandu who has become his guru.

There are, however, obstacles in Sonchai’s path to nirvana. Police Colonel Vikorn has just named Sonchai his consigliere (he’s been studying “The Godfather” on DVD): to troubleshoot, babysit, defuse, procure, reconnoiter–do whatever needs to be done in Vikorn’s ongoing battle with Army General Zinna for control of Bangkok’s network of illegal enterprises. And though Tietsin is enlightened and (eerily) charismatic, he also has forty million dollars’ worth of heroin for sale. If Sonchai truly wants to be an initiate into Tietsin’s “apocalyptic Buddhism,” he has to pull off a deal that will bring Vikorn and Zinna to the same side of the table. Further complicating the challenge is Tara: a Tantric practitioner who captivates Sonchai with her remarkable otherworldly techniques.

Here is Sonchai put to the extreme test–as a cop, as a Buddhist, as an impossibly earthbound man–in John Burdett’s most wildly inventive, darkly comic, and wickedly entertaining novel yet.

Book 4 of the series featuring the half Asian, half Caucasian Bangkok inspector Sonchai Jitpleecheep

The books in the series:

  1. Book 1: Bangkok 8
  2. Book 2: Bangkok Tattoo
  3. Book 3: Bangkok Haunts
  4. Book 4: The Godfather of Kathmandu
  5. Book 5: Vulture Peak

In My Hands Today…

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Love Marriage – V.V. Ganeshanathan

In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak of only two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage. In reality, there is a whole spectrum in between, but most of us spend years running away from the first toward the second.

The daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants who left their collapsing country and married in America, Yalini finds herself caught between the traditions of her ancestors and the lure of her own modern world. But when she is summoned to Toronto to help care for her dying uncle, Kumaran, a former member of the militant Tamil Tigers, Yalini is forced to see that violence is not a relic of the Sri Lankan past, but very much a part of her Western present.

While Kumaran’s loved ones gather around him to say goodbye, Yalini traces her family’s roots–and the conflicts facing them as ethnic Tamils–through a series of marriages. Now, as Kumaran’s death and his daughter’s politically motivated nuptials edge closer, Yalini must decide where she stands.

In My Hands Today…

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Grandad There’s a Head on the Beach (Jimm Jurrie #1) – Colin Cotterill

In rural Thailand, former crime reporter Jimm Juree must grapple with her quirky family, a mysterious mother and daughter on the lam and the small matter of a head on the beach.

When Jimm Juree’s mother sold the family house and invested in a rundown ‘holiday camp’ at the southern end of Thailand on the Gulf of Siam, the family had little choice but to follow. Jimm Juree, who was well on her way to achieving her goal of becoming the primary crime reporter for the major daily newspaper in Chiang Mai, is less than thrilled to have lost her job as a reporter and to be stuck in the middle of nowhere where little of interest happens.

So it is with mixed feelings that she greets the news that a head has washed up on the beach. It’s tragic, of course, but this could be the sort of sensational murder that would get her a byline in a major daily and keep her toehold on her journalism career. Now all she has to do is find out who was murdered, and why. Grandad, There’s a Head on the Beach is the second Jimm Juree Mystery from Colin Cotterill.

In My Hands Today…

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The Namesake – Jumpha Lahiri

The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves.