Slash and Burn by Colin Cotterill; The Dr. Siri Investigations, Book 8; Unabridged MP3 Audio Book; Narrator Clive Chafer

Dr. Siri might finally be allowed to retire (again). Although he loves his two morgue assistants, he’s tired of being Laos’ national coroner—a job he never wanted in the first place. Plus, he’s pushing eighty and wants to spend some time with his wife before his untimely death, which has been predicted by the local transvestite fortune teller.

But retirement is not in the cards for Dr. Siri after all. He’s dragged into one last job for the Lao government: supervising an excavation for the remains of a US fighter pilot who went down in the remote northern Lao jungle ten years earlier. The presence of American soldiers in Laos is a hot-button issue for both the Americans and the Lao involved, and the search party includes high-level politicians and scientists. When a member of the party is found dead, a chain of accidents that Dr. Siri suspects are not completely accidental is set off. Everyone is trapped in a cabin in the jungle, and the bodies are starting to pile up. Can Dr. Siri get to the bottom of the MIA pilot’s mysterious story before the fortune teller’s prediction comes true?

Praise for the Dr. Siri Paiboun series: “A series of terrifically beguiling detective novels steeped in local color and history.”—New York Times Book Review

Colin Cotterill was born in London. He has taught in Australia, the United States, and Japan and lived for many years in Laos where he worked for nongovernmental social-service organizations. He now writes full time and lives in Thailand. His books have been Book Sense Picks, and he won the Dilys Award and a Crime Writers’ Association Library Dagger for Thirty-Three Teeth.

Clive Chafer is a professional actor, director, and producer, as well as a theater instructor. Originally from England, he has been an Equity member for over twenty years and has performed and directed at many theaters in the San Francisco area, where he makes his home, and in Utah and Wisconsin. In 1993, he founded TheatreFIRST, Oakland's only professional, season-producing theater company, where he served as artistic director until 2008. Clive received his B.A. from Leeds University and his M.F.A. in staging Shakespeare from Exeter University in 2000. He teaches classical dramatic literature and other subjects at the University of San Francisco. He is also a linguist and naming consultant, and has developed several high-profile brands for companies such as Apple Computer, Subaru, and PayPal.