The Merry Misogynist by Colin Cotterill

By the time the calender pages had flipped around to 1978, Vientiane, the capital of the People's Democratic Republic of Laos, had become a dour place to live.

Title: The Merry Misogynist
Author: Colin Cotterill
ISBN: 9781569475560
Publisher: Soho Press/2009
Pages: 274

I was very pleased to get an ARC of the yet to be published The Merry Misogynist. Another Dr Siri Paiboun mystery. Our almost 74-year-old good doctor is back, now married to Madam Daeng and feeling younger day by day.

There is this serial killer who marries nubile young girls and then kills them the same day. And because lack of networking, such cases have virtually gone unreported. Our good doctor smells a rat and takes it upon himself to find out the killer. Ofcourse, he has help from his friends Dtui, her policeman husband Phoesy, and his wife Madam Daeng.

Meanwhile, our doctor is being harrassed by the housing people for letting people live in his govt accommodation. He has this habit of helping out everyone who is in need of it. So we also see him bending the law slightly to suit him.

There are some great descriptions of a Buddha temple and other landscapes. Another mystery which makes us breeze through it. Cotterill does creat very plausible charaters and can hold our interest till the end. Idiosyncrasies and all.


Other Colin Cotterill books I have read:

Disco of the Departed
Curse of the Pogo Stick

Click on the titles to read the reviews.