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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN num: 9781569474853
ISBN number: 1569474850
Label: Soho Crime
Manufacturer: Soho Crime
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 256
Printing Date: July 01, 2008
Publishing house: Soho Crime
Sale Popularity Level: 24912
Studio: Soho Crime
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“In the Curse of the Pogo Stick. . . . [Colin] Cotterill achieves a new and compelling sophistication.”—John Burdett
Praise for the Dr. Siri Paiboun Series:
“Wonderfully fresh and exotic.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Tragically funny and magically sublime.”—Entertainment Weekly
“A crack storyteller and an impressive guide to a little-known culture.”—The Washington Post Book World
“Delightful.”—Booklist (starred)
“This witty and unusual series just keeps getting better.”—Publishing houses Weekly
In Vientiane, a booby-trapped corpse, intended for Dr. Siri, the national coroner of Laos, has been delivered to the morgue. In his absence, only Nurse Dtui’s intervention saves the lives of the morgue attendants, visiting doctors, and Madame Daeng, Dr. Siri’s fiancée.
On his way back from a communist party meeting in the north, Dr. Siri is kidnapped by seven female Hmong villagers under the direction of the village elder so that he will—in the guise of Yeh Ming, the thousand-year-old shaman with whom he shares his body—exorcise the headman’s daughter whose soul is possessed by a demon, and lift the curse of the pogo stick.
Colin Cotterill is the author of The Coroner’s Lunch, Thirty-Three Teeth, Disco for the Departed, and Anarchy and Old Dogs, featuring seventy-three-year-old Dr. Siri Paiboun, national coroner of Laos. He and his wife live in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he teaches at the university.
For more information, visit www.colincotterill.com
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Rated by buyers 
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Colin Cotterill's series is just great! His characters are well-drawn and he gives you a plot, a bit of comedy, a bit of romance and a sense of what it is like to live in an Asian country recovering from war and poor leaders.
Rated by buyers -
If you like exotic locales, sympathetic characters and ingenious mysteries, you must meet Dr. Siri Paiboun. I would suggest going back to the very first book (I think this is #4 or #5.) I have greatly enjoyed them all. This one is not the best, the ending is too neatly and mechanically tied up, there is a little "series fatigue" in the plotting. The chapters that dealt with the Khmer people were I thought greatly engaging. This is one of the few books or series in a non-fantasy genre that can mix in a little of the supernatural without distorting the story line. Above all, there is humour and a matter-of-factness about life and death that leaves you, as most mystery fiction does not, feeling good about the world.
Rated by buyers -
I am a huge fan of Dr. Siri and this latest installment did not disppoint in any way. Excellent read and I am looking forward to the subsequent volume!
Rated by buyers -
In the late 1970s the Laotian National Coroner seventy-three years old Dr. Siri Paiboun is attending some governmental Communist Party function (waste of time if you ask him) in the north. Meanwhile back in the capital Vientiane a corpse of a soldier booby trapped with grenades is anonymously dropped off at the morgue. Only the fast and capable work of Paibourn's assistant Nurse Dtui avoids a tragedy from happening.
Meanwhile Paibourn looks forward to getting home to spend time with his fiancée Madame Daeng and even time in the morgue, which is better than attending these inane officious official officialdoms. Instead the female members of the Hmong tribe abduct Dr. Siri as they need his help; or at least of the millennium old shaman Yeh Ming is to perform an exorcism on the tribal chief's daughter demonically possessed due to an evil pogo stick placed on an alter.
CURSE OF THE POGO STICK is a solid historical mystery that contains two subplots, in which both contain humour inside serious situations that brings to life 1977-78 Laos. The Vientiane investigation is superbly written as Nurse Dtui cleverly leads the inquiry into who would use a dead soldier to kills others. However, Colin Cotterill's insight into the suppressed Hmong people, caught between the violent Communist regime and Nixon's just completed a few years ago secret war, is what makes this a great entry as neither side cares what happened to these expendable mountain pawns. The insight into the Hmong culture and their "collateral damage" plight supersede the whodunit.
Harriet Klausner
Rated by buyers -
I can't praise this series too highly; it's hard to break new ground in the mystery genre (that's why it's now a genre!), but Colin Cotterill has done so -- triumphantly. His descriptions make me feel that I'm back on the dusty streets of Vientiane, where an aid worker's SUV can pull up at a traffic light alongside a bullock cart and a lot of bicycles. And his characters feel like far more than just a Westerner's intepretation of what a Lao in the 70s must have been like.
Initially, I was wary of the shamanistic elements entering the narrative. With such a rich historical context to work in, I wondered how this could avoid puzzling and distracting the reader. (Also, I can live without New Age/fantasy interrupting my reading.) But they fit admirably, even in this book, which is less of a conventional mystery than the previous novels in the series, with Dr. Siri caught up in Hmong rituals after being kidnapped by a small group of these tribal members. It was somewhat jarring to have Dr. Siri operating independently from his faithful sidekicks in Vientiane, esp. Nurse Dtui, which is the only reason I have left off a fifth star. I also wouldn't recommend starting the series with this book -- too much previous knowledge of the characters is required.
Like some other reviewers, I hope Cotterill steers back toward a less esoteric topic and one that brings the principal characters together for his subsequent work -- but I'll still be buying it on the very first day I can because I don't want to have to wait longer than I must for the subsequent installment in this series. With each of them, I have had the feeling I get only from the books I enjoy most: I wish I hadn't read them so that I could have the pleasure of reading them for the very first time all over again.
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