The Coroner's Lunch by Colin Cotterill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been meaning to read this series for a long time and have had a couple of volumes of Cotterill's lying around the house forever. This first in a series featuring the reluctant coroner Dr. Siri introduces us to a lot in Laotian culture and history that I hadn't even thought to ask about.

I am a little more ambivalent about the endeavor than I would have been at the time it was written. 2004 is not all that long ago, but it's still on the other side of a watershed moment when more of the general public began to look at things through the lens of critical thinking about cultural appropriation. It's not that I noticed or even think that Cotterill got anything in particular wrong. I'm not in a position to know. It's just that in our very 'woke' moment, a Western writer writing a Laotian character stands out in a different way and raises questions that wouldn't have come up so much when it came out.

Nevertheless, Dr. Siri is an engaging character and he turns out to have an even more interesting backstory, which is revealed in the later portion of the book. One thing that definitely wouldn't have caused a stir when Cotterill wrote the novel is that in Laotian society, a great deal of polite handshaking goes on. Reading this as I did just as we were all learning the etiquette of social distancing, this oft-mentioned ritual made me gasp a few times in a way the author definitely never intended.

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