Book cluster: Reluctant Communist Cops
Picking up from bad dreams over Christmas, yesterday I had an anxiety dream about missing a flight to Japan where I needed to go for my company (unlikely, but that's dreams). I don't think I AM that anxious about work, but now maybe my subconscious maps anxiety to my employer any time anxiety comes up in dreams now -- I'm behind on chores that people are waiting on me for.
Here are a couple of mystery series I've been meaning to write about, with protagonists who have their own work issues:
Here are a couple of mystery series I've been meaning to write about, with protagonists who have their own work issues:
- Dr. Siri Paiboun mysteries, by Colin Cotterill. Siri's the national coroner of Laos and is sent on investigations here and there by his government. But he doesn't want to be the coroner. He was a field surgeon who thought he was retiring at 72, but the party kind of insisted (you want to keep your little government-furnished house, right?) on his becoming their coroner. Dry humor, not pathos. First book The Coroner's Lunch is set in 1976 (most professionals had fled Laos at that time). I didn't quite like something about the ending, but picked up another in the series when I came across it at B&N. This was *The Woman Who Wouldn't Die*, in which Siri and his wife (who has quite a history of her own) travel to a small distant village to supervise an excavation. Siri hasn't told the party he's hesitantly started to interact with spirits, which occasionally factor into the investigations. I like him, and other characters, and the location and local history are interesting to me. I plan to read the next story when it comes out in May, and have put on hold one of the in-between books I missed from the library.
- Inspector Chen mysteries, by Xiaolong Qiu. Chen is a police inspector in Shanghai in the 90's. He was assigned to the police after studying poetry in college, not anything he was aiming for, but has risen in the force almost despite himself. The first one I read was When Red Is Black, where Chen is off-duty translating a development proposal into English and trying to avoid being corrupted by all the money and favors floating around. His subordinate works a case (a murdered professor/writer), and Chen gets sucked into the case a bit as the story progresses. I don't actually care that much for Chen (his habit of quoting lots of poetry gets on other characters' nerves sometimes, too), but the surrounding characters, particularly the aforementioned subordinate and his restaurant-bookkeeper wife, are interesting, and the descriptions of food, life, politics, and economics in and around Shanghai are also interesting. I've also read Don't Cry, Tai Lake which has an environmental theme (I was interested to hear a story on NPR recently about new substantive crackdowns against pollution in China, a change from the huge emphasis on economic development at any cost), and Enigma of China which looks at Internet use and dissension in China. I wondered if the series was going to stop after Enigma, since Chen's position seemed to be getting perilous, but it looks like there's another one coming out next summer.