Anarchy and Old Dogs

And so, as I said, a mystery novel. To wit, Anarchy and Old Dogs, the fourth novel in the Siri Paiboun mysteries set in Laos in the 1970s, written by Colin Cotterill, a British guy who has spent much of his life in Southeast Asia. I picked it up more or less randomly at Flyleaf, though I had read books from the imprint which published it and liked them.

This one too has many merits. As with so many mystery novels, it is less about the mystery itself and more about moving a bunch of characters through space and allowing them to have interactions and adventures. In this case, in Laos, a country one tends to think about rather rarely, the smallest and poorest country in Southeast Asia, landlocked and mountainous. Perhaps one could view it as the West Virginia of Southeast Asia. 

Perhaps a mystery novel written by a Brit isn't the best way to get me thinking about the place, and almost surely many objections can and should be made to how he depicts Laos, but at least I'm thinking about it a little and I did a little perusing of the region on Wikipedia to contextualize it all. Better than nothing.

The texture and flow of the novel differ from that of most. In the end I was barely aware of the main contours of the mystery as such and really didn't care that much. I liked the characters a lot and want to spend more time with them, so I will, by going back to the first novel in the series, which extends out to fifteen or so. We'll see how many I read.