“The Delightful Life of a Suicide Pilot” by Colin Cotterill – Lost Riddle from the War
Colin Cotterill has gifted us many unusual and intriguing detective stories through his Dr. Siri Paiboun Mystery series, and the fifteenth novel, The Delightful Life of a Suicide Pilot, aims to bring the show to a close.
The recipient of a strange diary, Dr. Paiboun finds himself irresistibly launched into an investigation revolving around the life of a kamikaze pilot, one whose fate
“Don’t Eat Me” by Colin Cotterill – Leftovers of Justice
Colin Cotterill has taken Dr. Siri Paiboun on countless adventures making use of his detective skills more than any other profession he might have mastered. It seems there will never be a shortage of criminal conspiracies for our beloved doctor to solve as he returns to the helm once again in Don’t Eat Me.
This time around the whole mystery revolves around a skeleton which has been gnawed on, as well as the art of turning on movie camera.
“The Rat Catcher’s Olympics” by Colin Cotterill – Blood on the Podium
Colin Cotterill has taken Dr. Siri Paiboun all over Asia in his extraordinary investigative adventures, opening many windows into foreign worlds for his audience.
In his latest book in the series, The Rat Catcher’s Olympics, the good doctor takes a slight detour from the usual course as we are transported to the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow.
While the doctor suspects one of the Laotian athletes is concocting a conspiracy, one of the country’s Olympians becomes accused of murder… one Paiboun must navigate complex political waters to resolve.
“I Shot the Buddha” by Colin Cotterill – Guide the Monk to Truth and Safety
Colin Cotterill plunges us deep in the environment he knows best, following the adventures of Dr. Siri Paiboun once again as he races across Laos to find a Buddhist monk who suddenly vanished.
As it turns out, that monk went to help a friend cross the Mekhong River into Thailand in order to escape the prosecution and oppression threatening his life.
Unfortunately, nothing goes as planned and the task is severely complicated by everything life can throw at them, including some famous spiritualists, the deadly Laotian special forces, and a terribly-misguided criminal who never knew any better.
“It All Comes Back to You” by Beth Duke – Enjoying the Simpler Revelations
Beth Duke has found two years ago the kind of breakthrough any budding author could wish for, when her novel, It All Comes Back to You, became a celebrated bestseller. In it, we are told the story of Ronni, a practical nurse and aspiring writer, whose old patient, Violet, recently passed away.
In the process, she left Ronni with a challenge: she must publish Violet’s life in a book within a year, standing to inherit a grand fortune.
“Hell’s Super” by Mark Cain – The Mystery of the Escalator
Mark Cain has given us without a doubt one of the more original and humorous book collections available today with his Circles in Hell series, starting with the bestseller, Hell’s Super.
In it, we are introduced for the first time to Steve, hell’s superintendent, its handyman, who has fallen in love with a saint come to ease the suffering of the damned, all while trying to solve the mystery of the sabotaged escalator which leads from the bowels of hell to the pearly gates themselves.
“Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead” by Olga Tokarczuk – The Village of the Dying
Olga Tokarczuk may not be all too famous in the Western world, but she has certainly earned her stripes over in Europe, earning many prestigious awards along the way.
Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead might be one of her more interesting novels, following the trials and tribulations of an older reclusive woman living in a small Polish village where people are turning up dead under strange circumstances.
She tries to insert herself into the investigation, certain she knows who the culprit is… but much to the chagrin of new victims, nobody seems interested in her ideas.
“Mr. Flood’s Last Resort” by Jess Kidd – Insight Across Generations
Though she may have begun publishing her works only recently, Jess Kidd is an author who already displays a unique awareness of comedy and tragedy in daily human life, something we see on full display in her second novel titled Mr. Flood’s Last Resort (or The Hoarder in the U.K.).
It follows the story of a happy-go-lucky caretaker with a profoundly sad childhood who makes the acquaintance of an eccentric old man whose life mission is to clean up his mansion to stop his son from sending him to a retirement home.