by Colin Cotterill
Quercus, HK$195
It seems to be just another day of fun-packed forensics when Laos' national coroner Dr Siri Paiboon is called in to conduct a post-mortem examination of the body of a dentist flattened by a runaway truck on the capital Vientiane's dusty streets.
But what appears to be an innocent game of postal chess found in the squashed dentist's pocket turns out to be a secret communique written in invisible ink that exposes a royalist plot to oust the country's fledgling socialist state.
The conspiracy outlines a putsch and introduces the mysterious 'Devil's Vagina', the intrigue of which proves too much for the 73-year-old doctor to resist, especially when an old lady thought to be the dentist's minder goes missing amid signs of violent struggle and pools of blood.
But socialist bureaucracy and paranoia are never far away from spoiling the few glimpses of excitement in 1977 post-revolutionary Laos, and orders come through for Dr Siri to head south to Pakse to look into the suspicious death of a Vietnamese commissioner. He was electrocuted by a Russian water heater and the local governor tells Dr Siri that he fears a Soviet plot.