Search Worlds Without End

Laos, 1976: Dr Siri Paiboun, a 72-year-old medical doctor, has been unwillingly appointed the national coroner of newly-socialist Laos. Though his lab is underfunded, his boss is incompetent, and his support staff is quirky to say the least, Siri's sense of humor gets him through his often frustrating days.

When the body of the wife of a prominent politician comes through his morgue, Siri has reason to suspect the woman has been murdered. To get to the truth, Siri and his team face government secrets, spying neighbors, victim hauntings, Hmong shamans, botched romances, and other deadly dangers. Somehow, Siri must figure out a way to balance the will of the party and the will of the dead.

The national coroner of Laos, Dr Siri Paiboun, is no respecter of persons or party; at his advanced age he can afford to be independent. With the assistance of his helpers, Mr Geung and Nurse Dtui -- who has dubbed him "Super Spirit Doc" -- he elucidates the causes of mysterious deaths. But he also communes with the deposed king, whose special channel to the occult has left him, and attends a conference of shamans called by the Communist government to give the spirits an ultimatum: obey party orders or get out.

Dr Siri Paiboun, reluctant national coroner of the People's Democratic Republic of Laos, is summoned to a remote location in the mountains of Huaphan Province, where for years the leaders of the current government had hidden out in caves, waiting to assume power. Now, as a major celebration of the new regime is scheduled to take place, an arm is found protruding from the concrete walk that was laid from the President's former cave hideout to his new house beneath the cliffs. Dr Siri is ordered to supervise the disinterment of the body attached to the arm, identify the corpse, and discover how he died.

A blind retired dentist has been run down by a logging truck on the street in Vientiane just opposite the post office. His body is duly delivered to the morgue of Dr Siri Paiboun, the official and only coroner of Laos. At the age of seventy-four, Dr Siri is too old to be in awe of the new communist bureaucrats for whom he now works. He identifies the corpse, helped by the letter in the man's pocket. But first he must decipher it; it is written in code and invisible ink. The dentist's widow explains that the enigmatic letters and numbers describe chess moves, but they are unlike any chess symbols Siri has previously encountered. With the help of his old friend, Civilai, now a senior member of the Laos politburo; Nurse Dtui; Phosy, a police officer; and Aunt Bpoo, a fortune-teller, Dr Siri solves the mystery of the note and foils a plot to overthrow the government of Laos.

In Vientiane, a booby-trapped corpse, intended for Dr Siri, the national coroner of Laos, has been delivered to the morgue. In his absence, only Nurse Dtui's intervention saves the lives of the morgue attendants, visiting doctors, and Madame Daeng, Dr Siri's fiance. On his way back from a communist party meeting in the north, Dr Siri is kidnapped by seven female Hmong villagers under the direction of the village elder so that he will-in the guise of Yeh Ming, the thousand-year-old shaman with whom he shares his body-exorcise the headman's daughter whose soul is possessed by a demon, and lift the curse of the pogo stick.

In poverty-stricken 1978 Laos, a man with a truck from the city was "somebody," a catch for even the prettiest village virgin. The corpse of one of these bucolic beauties turns up in Dr. Siri's morgue and his curiosity is piqued. The victim was tied to a tree and strangled but she had not, as the doctor had expected, been raped, although her flesh had been torn. And though the victim had clear, pale skin over most of her body, her hands and feet were gnarled, callused, and blistered.

On a trip to the hinterlands, Siri discovers that the beautiful female corpse bound to a tree has already risen to the status of a rural myth. This has happened many times before. He sets out to investigate this unprecedented phenomenon "a serial killer in peaceful Buddhist Laos" only to discover when he has identified the murderer that not only pretty maidens are at risk.

Seventy-three-year-old coroners can be victims, too.

When a Lao female security officer is discovered stabbed through the heart with a fencing sword, Dr. Siri, the reluctant national coroner for the People's Democratic Republic of Laos, is brought in to examine the body.

Soon two other young women are found killed in the same unusual way. Siri learns that all three victims studied in Europe and that one of them was being pursued by a mysterious stalker. But before he can solve the case, he is whisked away to Cambodia on a diplomatic mission. Though on the surface the Khmer Rouge seem to be committed to the socialist cause, Siri soon learns the horrifying truth of the killing fields and finds himself thrown into prison. Can the seventy-four-year-old doctor escape with his life?

Dr Siri never really wanted to be Laos's national coroner. And now that he is in his mid-70s, he longs to spend some time with his wife before the untimely death that is sure to befall him, according to the local fortune-teller. But retirement will have to wait (again) until he has completed 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. And the stakes are high.

The presence of American soldiers in Laos is controversial, and the search party includes high-level politicians and scientists. So when a member of the party is found dead, Dr Siri suspects it may not have been an accident. Can Dr Siri get to the bottom of the MIA pilot's mysterious story before the body count rises and the fortune-teller's prediction comes true?

In a small Lao village, a very strange thing has happened. A woman was shot and killed in her bed during a burglary; she was given a funeral and everyone in the village saw her body burned. Then, three days later, she was back in her house as if she'd never been dead at all. But now she's clairvoyant, and can speak to the dead. That's why the long-dead brother of a Lao general has enlisted her to help his brother uncover his remains, which have been lost at the bottom of a river for many years.

Lao national coroner Dr Siri Paiboun and his wife, Madame Daeng, are sent along to supervise the excavation. It could be a kind of relaxing vacation for them, maybe, except Siri is obsessed with the pretty undead medium's special abilities, and Madame Daeng might be a little jealous. She doesn't trust the woman for some reason-is her hunch right? What is the group really digging for at the bottom of this remote river on the Thai border? What war secrets are being covered up?

Laos, 1979: Dr Siri Paiboun, the twice retired ex-National Coroner of Laos, receives an unmarked package in the mail. Inside is a handwoven pha sin, a colorful traditional skirt worn in northern Laos. A lovely present, but who sent it to him, and why? And, more importantly, why is there a severed human finger stitched into the sin's lining?

Siri is convinced someone is trying to send him a message and won't let the matter rest until he's figured it out. He finagles a trip up north to the province where the sin was made, not realising he is embarking on a deadly scavenger hunt. Meanwhile, the northern Lao border is about to erupt into violence -- and Dr Siri and his entourage are walking right into the heart of the conflict.

Laos, 1979: Retired coroner Siri Paiboun and his wife, Madame Daeng, have never been able to turn away a misfit. As a result, they share their small Vientiane house with an assortment of homeless people, mendicants, and oddballs. One of these oddballs is Noo, a Buddhist monk, who rides out on his bicycle one day and never comes back, leaving only a cryptic note in the refrigerator: a plea to help a fellow monk escape across the Mekhong River to Thailand.

Naturally, Siri can't turn down the adventure, and soon he and his friends find themselves running afoul of Lao secret service officers and famous spiritualists. Buddhism is a powerful influence on both morals and politics in Southeast Asia. In order to exonerate an innocent man, they will have to figure out who is cloaking terrible misdeeds in religiosity.

1980: The Democratic People's Republic of Laos is proud to be competing in its first-ever Olympics. Of course, half the world is boycotting the Moscow Summer Olympic Games to protest Russia's recent invasion of Afghanistan, but that has made room for athletes from countries that are usually too small or underfunded to be competitive--countries like Laos.

Ex-national coroner of Laos Dr Siri Paiboun may be retired, but he and his wife, Madame Daeng, would do just about anything to have a chance to visit Moscow, so Siri finagles them the job of medical oversight for the Olympians. Most of the athletes are young and innocent village people who have never worn shoes, never mind imagined anything as marvelous as the Moscow Olympic Village. As the competition heats up, however, Siri begins to suspect that one of the athletes is not who he says he is. Fearing a conspiracy, Siri and his friends investigate, liaising in secret with Inspector Phosy back home in Laos to see if the man might be an assassin. But Siri's progress is derailed when another Lao Olympian is accused of murder. Now in the midst of a murky international incident, Dr. Siri must navigate not one but two paranoid and secretive government machines to make sure justice is done.

Dr Siri Paiboun, the ex-national coroner of Laos, may have more experience dissecting bodies than making art, but when he manages to smuggle a fancy movie camera into the country he devises a plan to shoot a Lao adaptation of War and Peace with his friend Civilai. The only problem? The Ministry of Culture must approve the script before they can get rolling. That and they can't figure out how to turn on the camera.

Meanwhile, the skeleton of a woman has appeared under the Anusawari Arch in the middle of the night. Siri puts his directorial debut on hold and assists his friend, the newly promoted Senior Police Inspector Phosy Vongvichai, with the ensuing investigation. Though the death of the unknown woman seems to be recent, the flesh on her corpse has been picked off in places as if something--or someone--has been gnawing on the bones. The plot Phosy soon uncovers involves much more than single set of skeletal remains.

Vientiane, 1980: For a man of his age and in his corner of the world, Dr Siri, the 76-year-old former national coroner of Laos, is doing remarkably well--especially for someone possessed by a thousand-year-old Hmong shaman. That is, until he finds a mysterious note tied to his dog, Ugly's, tail: a death threat not just to him, but to everyone he holds dear. And whoever wrote the note claims the job will be executed in two weeks.

Thus, at the urging of his wife and his motley crew of faithful friends, Dr Siri contemplates who would hold such a strong grudge as to wish him dead, prompting him to recount three incidents over the years: an early meeting with his lifelong pal Civilai in Paris in the early '30s, a particularly disruptive visit to an art museum in Saigon in 1956, and a prisoner of war negotiation in Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War in the '70s. There will be grave consequences in the present if Dr Siri can't put together the clues in the past.

Laos, 1981: When an unofficial mailman drops off a strange bilingual diary, Dr Siri is intrigued. Half is in Lao, but the other half is in Japanese, which no one Siri knows can read; it appears to have been written during the Second World War. Most mysterious of all, it comes with a note stapled to it: Dr Siri, we need your help most urgently. But who is "we," and why have they left no return address?

To the chagrin of his wife and friends, who have to hear him read the diary out loud, Siri embarks on an investigation by examining the text. Though the journal was apparently written by a kamikaze pilot, it is surprisingly dull. Twenty pages in, no one has even died, and the pilot never mentions any combat at all. Despite these shortcomings, Siri begins to obsess over the diary's abrupt ending... and the riddle of why it ended up in his hands. Did the kamikaze pilot ever manage to get off the ground? To find out, he and Madame Daeng will have to hitch a ride south and uncover some of the darkest secrets of the Second World War.