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KILLED AT THE WHIM OF A HAT
by Colin Cotterill
Minotaur Books, July 2011
384 pages
$24.99
ISBN: 0312564538


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Jimm Juree, a thirty-something Thai crime reporter, has been cooling her heels for almost a year, exiled from the big city Chiang Mai in the north, where she had been poised on the brink of becoming the first female senior crime reporter in Chiang Mai Mail history. But her mother, who is perhaps slowly sliding into dementia, sold up their city property and with the proceeds bought a run-down resort in the far south, requiring the entire family to relocate against their better judgement. Ever since, Jimm Juree has been reduced to reporting coconut yield statistics and the odd traffic accident. No wonder she is absolutely delighted to hear that an ancient VW Kombi camper has been discovered buried nearby and inside are two skeletons, one wearing a hat.

Nor is that all. Back in the police station, Jimm Juree hears that a local Buddhist abbot has been found stabbed to death. He too was wearing a hat, in violation of monastic regulations. The only suspects are the temple's resident monk and nun, and Jimm likes the nun too much to believe she did it. Nevertheless, Jimm sees her chance. The police will not be quick to solve the crimes. They like to cover all the bases. Confronted with a head in a plastic bag hanging from a bridge, they were reluctant to rule out suicide. If Jimm can crack these cases, she's back in the running as a national crime reporter.

Her family proves invaluable. And it's quite a family. Her grandfather is a retired traffic cop with little to say for himself but with useful connections in the police. Her elder brother, well, sister, is a transgendered beauty queen with considerable computer expertise. Her younger brother is an obsessed body-builder without a gym, reduced to staying in shape by booting a log around the beach. The local gay policeman is also extremely helpful. And Jimm herself is a smart-talking cynic, who is, all the same, vulnerable to the claims of family.

If all this sounds a bit like a Thai re-make of You Can't Take It with You, in a way it is, at least in the earlier pages. But Cotterill soon settles to his main task of letting Jimm loose on the investigation while gently evoking a portrait of Thai culture that is both attractive and surprising.

Fans of Cotterill's Laotian Dr Siri Paiboun series, which is set close to forty years ago, will be curious to see what the author makes of the present day and of the country where he now lives. His Thailand is seductive though hardly without flaw. Corruption may be endemic, but the people are generous and accepting. The broad menu of sexual possibility from which the characters are free to choose appears to be met without a lifted eyebrow. His narrator Jimm proves a slightly cynical and amusing narrator, a very modern thirty-something woman. In this congenial context, the Bushisms that give the book its title and that introduce each chapter make a loopy kind of sense - like Cotterill's Thai characters, they view reality from a slightly slantwise and quite charming perspective.

Cotterill explains his decision to launch a new series: "Believe it or not, there are people who are turned off by ghosts and politics and 73-year-old protagonists." Except perhaps for the ghosts, I am not one of these, but all the same, this new direction looks like a winning one.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, August 2011

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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