Most adults have 32 teeth, and those with 33 are considered to be psychic. Such exalted individuals include the uncle of the deposed king of Laos, Lord Buddha, and our hero: 72 year-old Siri Paiboun who is the national coroner of Communist Laos. Siri is a rowdy old gentleman who has recently discovered that he houses the spirit of a powerful, long-dead Hmong shaman named Yeh Ming. The shaman has woken up within him, which now makes him sensitive to psychic disturbances and able to see ghosts.

Thirty-Three Teeth opens in 1977. Siri sits in the back yard of his ugly suburban house, getting drunk on Soviet vodka with his friend Civilai who is a high-ranking Party official. They gripe and banter.

Little does Siri know that an old bear has escaped from the confines of her concrete cage at a hotel, and is roaming the sweltering night streets of Vientiane. An old woman will be mauled by a fanged creature while sitting in her outhouse. And two corpses, involved in a bicycle wreck, will turn up in his morgue in the morning.

Soon Siri will be struggling with two unrelated cases: the two bicycle-casualties, and a streak of murders caused by a clawed or fanged creature. A werewolf? The Laos cops think it must be the escaped bear, and step up their search for her. The poor men found dead atop a crushed bicycle offer an equally strange puzzle. One of them was riding the bicycle, but the other obviously jumped from a building overhead and smacked into the first. What would cause the second guy to commit suicide? Perhaps a sinister wooden chest in the top floor of his building that pulses with evil intent. Locked, it bears the royal seal, and Siri advises against opening it.

If all that weren’t enough, the government whisks Siri away to a northern province for a third case: investigating the burned bodies of two helicopter pilots retrieved from a crash. In hot Vientiane, without his guidance, Siri’s assistants must toil along: Dtui, a large and ambitious nurse; and Geung, an endearing young man with Down’s Syndrome.

Thirty-Three Teeth winds its fast-paced way through the surrealistic and often funny workings of Communist Laos. The chapter in which a nervous provincial governor attempts to impart Party policy to a crowd of rowdy shamans is worth the price of the book alone. It’s a further treat to run across a despairing king, and a colorful troupe of Soviet circus performers later on. (The escaped bear, by the way, ends up with loving people – just in case you worried about her like I did.)

This is an outstanding mystery, beautifully written, about a little-known time and place. You owe it to yourself to get this Dilys-Award-winning mystery for your collection. Thirty-Three Teeth is the second book in Cotterill’s Laos series (the first book is The Coroner’s Lunch), and can be found on Amazon through this link: Thirty-three Teeth