Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Posts Tagged ‘multiple murders’

Copacabana. The word brings up pictures of a beautiful beach, bikini-clad bodies, and Brazil’s national drink, the caipirinha.  So where do police corruption and murder fit into this picture?

Inspector Espinoza, chief of the 12th precinct in the city, has seen three policemen, one in his own precinct, killed within a few days.  Strangely enough, there doesn’t seem to be a big effort on the part of their fellow officers to find the killer or killers.  Espinoza decides to form a small task force with three of his subordinates to look into the deaths further, but they are stymied by the lack of cooperation they’re receiving.  It’s obvious there’s a coverup going on, but why?

More investigation turns up the fact that all three men were married but had mistresses.  Each lived a double life, one at home with his wife and children, the others without them in a nearly empty apartment.  Plus each of their mistresses had her own apartment.  What were they hiding?

Then two of the policemen’s mistresses are murdered. Across the street from the third mistress’s apartment, a woman named Serena sees what she thinks is a third murder.  She sees a woman directly opposite her window arguing with someone, a purse flying out the widow, almost immediately followed by the woman’s body.    She’s sees a police car and an ambulance at the scene a few minutes later, but when she questions the building’s doorman the next morning, he tells a different tale.  The woman was alone, there was no purse, and the woman threw herself out of the window.  Case closed.

Upset at the differences between what she thinks she saw and what the doorman tells her, Serena tells the story to her husband, a high official in the government, but he tells her it’s her imagination getting the best of her.   And even if it happened the way she tells it, it’s not her business.  If the police are satisfied, that’s the end of it.

But Serena isn’t satisfied, so she calls Inspector Espinoza to tell him her story. And that leads to even more complications.

The reader has been led to believe that it was the third mistress who went out the window.  But, in fact, it was not.   The third mistress, Celeste, in a later  interview with the police acknowledges that she and the other women knew their lovers were taking “tips,” or bribes, to supplement their salaries.  She doesn’t know the details, but since she’s the only one of the mistresses alive, she’s sure she’s next on the killer’s list.  Then she disappears.

Garcia-Roza paints a picture of a city with a culture of corruption. It’s easy for murders, even of policemen, to be only superficially investigated, and as for their mistresses, who really cares?  Perhaps it’s easy for Espinoza to get so involved with his police work since his personal life is rather empty.  Married and divorced, with a son who lives with his mother in the United States, he has a relationship with a woman that seems to go no further than a night of sex when it’s convenient for both of them.   He’s a man who’s cold inside.

You can read more about Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza at this web site.

Laos is a country far from the United States.  Unless you’re a history buff or “of a certain age,” as they say in magazines and newspapers, you may not be familiar with its history in relation to the Vietnam War.  Reading this novel is like taking a mini-course in the aftermath of that war’s history.

“I celebrate the dawn of my seventy-fourth birthday handcuffed to a lead pipe.  I’d had something more traditional in mind….” That’s the opening of Love Songs from a Shallow Grave.

Dr. Siri is the hero, in every sense, of Colin Cotterill’s series of books set in the Laotian capital of Vientiane in the late 1970s.  The doctor is a passive Communist and ready to retire when the new regime takes over from the monarchy, but he’s forced into becoming the country’s one and only coroner.

In Love Songs he has recently married Madame Daeng and is looking forward to a relaxing weekend with her when he’s pulled out of the local cinema by the Vietnamese head of security.  Laos is an independent country, but it is very dependent on good relations with Vietnam, its more powerful neighbor.  So the doctor reluctantly follows Chief Phoumi to the former American compound where they find a young woman who has been run through with a fencing sword, an epee to be exact.

Then, a couple of days later, another young woman is found in a similar situation, run through with yet another epee.  What can be the connection between these two women, who as far as can be determined were strangers to each other?

The usual group of Dr. Siri’s friends appear in this novel.  There’s the police detective Phosy, his wife nurse Dtui, morgue assistant Mr. Geung, the doctor’s close friend Civilai, and of course the doctor’s new wife, Madame Daeng.  In addition to helping Dr. Siri, each has a story within the novel that helps bring the history of Laos into sharper focus. 

Although the reader knows from the beginning that Dr. Siri is in prison, it’s impossible to figure out how he got there and why. The mental diary in which Dr. Siri reveals his thoughts doesn’t tell us until nearly the end of the novel, and these thoughts are interspersed with the straightforward plot of the main novel.

Dr. Siri is a wonderful protagonist.  He’s smart, courageous, and pragmatic–he has to be to get along in the new Laos.  But he’s also caring and empathic, traits that are not highly valued at the time and place in which he lives.  It’s  the combination of both sides of his character that makes him so fascinating, as well as the multi-layered history of his country.

This novel, along with the others in the series, isn’t easy reading because the history of this country in the 1970s isn’t comfortable to read–it’s filled with torture and betrayals from all sides.  But knowing people like Dr. Siri and his friends are there fills the reader with hope.

You can read more about Colin Cotterill at his definitely off-beat web site and read an interview with him at the NPR web site.