The Coroner's Lunch

Cotterill's Vientiane belongs to the first year of the Lao People's Democratic Republic, a shabby, watchful riverside capital where the new order runs on rumour and shortage. Dr Siri Paiboun, drafted at seventy-two into the job of national coroner, works out of a broken-down morgue at Mahosot Hospital and carries his cases from the ministries and the Mekong quay to the That Luang stupa, and once far north to the Hmong highlands of the Plain of Jars.

Dr Siri Paiboun

The morgue at Mahosot Hospital

Chapter 1

The book runs out of a run-down morgue at Mahosot Hospital, where the reluctant coroner and his two assistants make do with failing equipment and no proper training. The bodies that start the plot, a Party official's wife and three drowned men, all pass across these tables. The hospital is real and still stands by the river; the state morgue of the story is Cotterill's invention set inside it.

Chapter 1

explicit Mahosot Hospital is a real hospital on Quai Fa Ngum by the Mekong in Vientiane; this marks the hospital grounds, where the novel's fictional national morgue is housed.

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