Slash and Burn by Colin Cotterill

This was the November selection for my mystery book group.  It is the seventh in this series, set in Laos in the 1970s and featuring the national coroner (indeed, the only coroner in Laos), Dr. Siri Paiboun.  Siri is in his 70s and is too independent-minded to get along well with his superiors in the government.  He is also too old to care what they think.  He is, further, ideologically suspect because he lived for some years in Paris.  And he is occasionally possessed by the spirit of an ancient shaman.

This is the second of these books I have read.  Several years ago I read Disco for the Departed and, though I didn't mind it, I also didn't like it well enough to seek out any of the others.  It is an interesting time and place to set a series of mysteries, as they are trying to pull things back together after all the events around the Vietnam War.  Cotterill references the events of the times without stopping to lecture the reader, which I greatly appreciate.  I hate it when an author feels the need to over-explain a non-western setting or treat the readers like they are idiots.  (Tarquin Hall, I'm looking at you)

In Slash and Burn, Dr. Siri and his staff are included in a mission to search for a helicopter crash site where an American pilot went down ten years earlier.  The other half of the team are Americans, and understandably there are some communications difficulties as times.  But then one of the Americans gets killed, and some of the details concerning the crash don't add up, and it's up to Siri and his friends to figure out what's going on underneath the surface.

Which all seems fairly straightforward, but there is a whole extra level of mysticism in the novel.  There is Dr. Siri's magic, but they are also accompanied by a cross-dressing psychic who invites herself along on the trip, and the final showdown with the bad guys at the end is quite ... unusual for a mystery novel.  I will be very curious to see what the others in my group thin,, as most of them are not fantasy readers and I suspect some of them may be unpleasantly surprised by the addition of magic to an apparently straightforward international mystery.

I found Slash and Burn mostly to be a slow read.  It took me most of a day, and while I was moderately absorbed in the story, I can't help but think that I could have spent the day reading something I was actually excited about, instead.  That's the problem with book groups.  There were certainly things that I think were supposed to be humorous, but they mostly didn't amuse me that much.  For me this was okay without being something I especially enjoyed.  But at least it was a novel experience.

Mad River by John Sandford

Mad River is the latest Virgil Flowers novel by Sandford.  Virgil is an unconventional investigator for the BCA, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.  I generally like these novels better than his other main series about Lucas Davenport.  I read both series, I just like these better.

I did not like Mad River, however.

It's set in southwest Minnesota again, and follows a trio of young people on a killing spree.  A lot of people end up dead in a lot of senseless violence.  Virgil is also investigating a man who might have had his wife killed, and nothing goes right.  This book is lots of failure and frustration, and was just not at all satisfying, and lacking the things I like in the Virgil novels.  It is still probably marginally better than Heat Lightning, in which is was chasing down a Vietnamese hit squad, but it still wasn't good.  This was definitely not one of the good ones in the series.

Man, how annoying.  And now I've probably got to wait another year for the next one, which will hopefully be a lot better.

Damn.