Dr Siri Paiboun Books in Order

In mid-1970s Laos, seventy-two-year-old Dr. Siri Paiboun is pulled out of retirement and made national coroner. When a politically sensitive corpse lands in his morgue, he finds murder, state secrets, and some very restless dead.

Dr. Siri heads to Luang Prabang as mutilated bodies, official panic, and spirit-world trouble start to pile up. To solve the case, he has to balance forensic thinking, village belief, and the realities of the new Lao state.

An arm sticks out of a newly laid walkway near the old revolutionary caves of Huaphan. Siri is sent to identify the buried man, and the excavation uncovers murder, secrecy, and a past someone hoped would stay sealed.

A blind retired dentist is run down by a logging truck, but Siri does not buy the accident story. A coded note in invisible ink pulls him toward political intrigue and the possibility of rebellion.

Kidnapped by Hmong villagers, Siri is asked to deal with a girl thought to be possessed by a demon linked to a strange Western object. The case mixes prophecy, folklore, and a village mystery with real danger underneath.

When a young woman arrives at Siri's morgue strangled and tied to a tree, he starts to see a pattern. The hunt for the killer leads into the countryside, where even a seventy-something coroner is not safe.

Three Lao women are murdered with fencing swords, and Siri is drawn into a baffling investigation. Before he can finish it, he is sent to Cambodia, where the case collides with the brutal reality of the Khmer Rouge.

Siri wants retirement, but first he is sent into the northern jungle to supervise the recovery of an American pilot's remains. What should be one last official job turns into another knot of history, politics, and murder.

A Lao woman is killed, cremated, and then somehow returns with the power to speak to the dead. Siri and Madame Daeng travel to a remote river excavation where war secrets and local belief are tangled together.

A beautiful handwoven skirt arrives in the post with a severed finger stitched into its lining. Following that clue sends the retired Siri north on a scavenger hunt that quickly turns deadly.

When a monk disappears and leaves behind a cryptic plea for help, Siri and his friends start pulling at several linked mysteries at once. The trail leads through religion, murder, and motives that are anything but holy.

Laos heads to the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and Siri wrangles himself a place on the trip. There he suspects one athlete may be an assassin, then finds himself in the middle of an international murder mess.

Siri decides to make a Lao version of War and Peace with a smuggled movie camera and more enthusiasm than sense. Cultural censors, political absurdity, and a fresh mystery turn the project into a dangerous farce.

A death threat aimed at Siri and everyone he loves forces him to revisit key episodes from his past. To stop the killer, he has to understand what happened years earlier in Paris, Saigon, and Hanoi.

An urgent note and a bilingual wartime diary land in Siri's hands with no explanation. The search for the truth behind the journal sends him and Madame Daeng south into buried Second World War secrets.