The Nature of Things

After reading the first book in the Dr. Siri Paiboun series,  The Coroner's Lunch , I decided that I had not had enough of the good doctor and so I immediately started this second book in the series,  Thirty-Three Teeth . It is another charming study of Colin Cotterill's unique character, the 72-year-old Pathet Lao revolutionary, who, upon the success of the revolution in 1975, was drafted by the Party to become Laos' one and only coroner. In this entry, it is 1976 and something is killing women in Vientiane. It seems to be an animal of some sort, one which leaves the marks of its huge bite on the bodies. At first Dr. Siri suspects a bear, partly because he has recently seen a bear in one of his visionary dreams. Then he learns that a bear that had been housed in inhumane conditions in the city has escaped its cage and he feels that his surmise must have been correct. But his assistant, the redoubtable Dtui, begins to have her doubts and she learns from a Russian animal exp...

Laos 1975. The long Pathet Lao Revolution has succeeded. The monarchy has abdicated and the new communist regime is in the process of being formed.  Dr. Siri Paiboun had been a part of the long revolution. He has been a communist for 47 years, but he didn't really become one because of ideology. He became one out of love for a woman he met while studying in Paris. She was a committed communist and so, to please her, he joined the Party. The two were married and ultimately returned to Laos to join the struggle. Now that struggle has succeeded and Dr. Siri is 72 and looking forward to retirement and a reprieve from the long privation of life in the jungle. His beloved wife is long dead, killed in an explosion. She had been so devoted to the revolution that she had refused to have children and so Siri has no children or grandchildren. He is alone, but looking forward to a life of solitude. It is not to be. Siri is informed by a Party official that he has been designated to be the coun...

GRASS by Carl Sandburg, 1918 PILE the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work-- I am the grass; I cover all.    And pile them high at Gettysburg And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: What place is this? Where are we now?    I am the grass. Let me work. HAVE A SAFE AND HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND AND NEVER FORGET WHAT WE COMMEMORATE WITH THIS HOLIDAY. DON'T LET THE GRASS COVER OUR MEMORIES.

The Fifth Woman  is the sixth in Henning Mankell's series of books featuring the morose Swedish detective Kurt Wallander, and in this one I felt that he finally hit his stride. It was well-written (also well-translated which was important since I was reading it in English) and kept the action moving, which kept me turning those pages. It was interestingly plotted and featured a goodly number of red herrings, some of which were never explained. By now, we are used to the fact that Wallander is a severely depressive personality who also suffers from hypochondria. He's always imagining he's coming down with something, a common cold, a heart attack, or whatever is the flavor of illness at the moment. But at the beginning of this book, we see a different Wallander. He has made a trip to Rome with his aged father who suffers from the beginnings of Alzheimer's. It is a trip that his father had long wanted to make and that had been long postponed. Both of them understand that i...

One of the great joys of my life as a reader is discovering a wonderful writer that I had not read before. That's happened to me several times within the last year, and one of my favorite discoveries was Richard Ford . It's not that I was unaware of Mr. Ford, who has been a superstar in the American firmament of writers for many years now. But I had just never gotten around to reading him. Finally, last year, I read his Frank Bascombe trilogy: The Sportswriter , Independence Day , and The Lay of the Land . From the first pages of The Sportswriter , it was clearly evident to me what all the shouting was about. The man can write! He has a love of language and of finding just the right word for expressing what he wants to say that shines through in every sentence. It was also clear to see why the second book in the series, Independence Day , had won all those prizes. It is still the only book ever to have won both the Pulitzer and the PEN/Faulkner awards. For a couple of weeks now...

Maisie Dobbs has been on her own as a private investigator/psychologist for about a year in this second entry in Jacqueline Winspear's well-written series. She has gained a new office, new living quarters, and an assistant, Billy Beale, and she has gained some measure of respect from the police, especially Detective Inspector Stratton of Scotland Yard. She is contacted by a self-made, brash, and impatient businessman named Joseph Waite (An impatient businessman named Waite. Get it? Sorry, couldn't resist!) It seems that Waite's daughter, 32-year-old Charlotte, has run away from the family home and Waite wants her found and brought back immediately if not sooner. Meantime, the police are investigating the murder of a young woman about Charlotte's age, but before the crime can be solved, another young woman is murdered in similar fashion. As Maisie proceeds in her search for the missing woman, she discovers that there may be a link between her and the murdered women. Then...