Don't Eat Me by Colin Cotterill

This is the thirteenth book in its series, and I feel like I've reached the point of diminishing returns. The Dr. Siri series started off something of a revelation; they're historical Laotian magical-realist murder mysteries, and if that appeals to you it's definitely worth finding the first few of them, starting with The Coroner's Lunch. Siri Paiboun was an aging doctor for the Communist insurgency in Laos who was pressed into becoming the country's national coroner when he intended to retire, while also discovering that he had some unwanted connections to the spirit world. The books are funny, and revelatory of Communist history in Southeast Asia in very relatable ways through the character of the irascible doctor and his compatriots.

But as the series has moved on it's gotten farther and farther away from that core, and Don't Eat Me isn't really much of a Doctor Siri book at all. All of the past characters appear, as if this were a late-season TV episode where all of the actors were contractually obligated to get screen time. But the focus here is on two of the series' least-deep and least-interesting characters, Inspector Phosy and Judge Haeng, and everyone else gets the short end of the stick.

Judge Haeng has always been the series' cartoon villain, and this book kicks that up several notches. The previous books mostly played him for comic relief as a personification of the haphazardness of the new Communist government, while the real villainy was in supernatural beings facing off against Dr. Siri. But they don't show up at all in this book, so Judge Haeng has to carry most of that weight on his own.

He doesn't do it by gaining any depth, but merely by gaining rather unexpected criminal mastermind powers. And they're targeted on Phosy, rather than on anyone closer to Dr. Siri for some reason. Phosy is the series' everyman character, and can we just give up on the everyman archetype? It's never interesting, it's never good, and yet we seem to be stuck with it. With a whole book of opportunity to give Phosy some interesting characteristic, Cotterill passes, choosing instead to spend the whole time on his unwillingness to delegate responsibility, the flaw of every everyman who gets authority thrust upon him.

With everyone else relegated to the sidelines and those two taking over, Cotterill takes the opportunity to engage in another habit of long-running series authors: neglecting his novel in favor of writing a polemic. One of the great things about this series is how it deals with Communism and the Communist government of Laos in the 1970s as concrete, human things, things that are flawed but that you can also understand why the characters might have wanted them. But now Cotterill has taken an interest in wild animal trafficking. And if you're going to write a polemic that's probably a pretty good choice, but both the book and the afterword make it clear that he didn't take the time to do any real research on the economics of trafficking, characteristics of the animals he's talking about, or where the funding for wildlife conservation comes from. Instead he relies on a couple of sensationalist popular narratives and wings it from there, ending up in all sorts of bizarre and unrealistic places.

There's a tapir in this one, and usually that's enough to sell me. But this isn't really a tapir, it's just another Malay Peninsula animal that Colin Cotterill has heard the name of, in a long string of them. There's a bit with a clouded leopard at the end, particularly, that makes me wonder if Cotterill has any idea how big they are. (Or aren't.)

I found this a pretty substantial disappointment after what was at least one of the funnier installments in book 12, The Rat-Catchers' Olympics. There's a fair chunk of foreshadowing here for the next book, but none of it was exceptionally appealing. The first several books in this series will always be favorites, but maybe it's time for me to move on.