Jimm Juree is 34 years old and single. She is annoyed when people don't believe that she had a career, as a metropolitan crime reporter, before her mother. Mair, moved the family to the rural south, to take over the hilariously mis-named Lovely Resort. The country is current-day Thailand. Jimm's world, and, consequently, the book, is peopled by a cast of characters, and I mean characters. As usual, Cotterill's descriptions really let you know the people, usually with affectionate humor, or just humor.
As you can guess from the title, Jimm finds a severed human head washed up on the beach. Following regulations, which she doesn't do very often, Jimm reports the head to Beung, the village headman. She finds him on his porch nursing a drink: "Beung is all about show. He has a closet full of uniforms he wears at the slightest excuse: volunteer highway patrol, village security unit, coastal air force, scout leader, village headman's association, and many more. I'd even seen him in camouflaged army fatigues putting manure around his palm trees. I hadn't spotted him at first."
The head is just the start of Jimm's day. By the time she hits the sack, she has three mysteries to solve:
1. Why has a designer-clothed mother-daughter pair stopped to stay at the Lovely Resort, even paying in advance, and driving a Honda with no license plates?
2. Who is the head on the beach and why was it sliced neatly off its body with a machete?
3. Who is spending the night with Mair in her cabin and why is Mair denying any one is doing so?
I had several laugh-out-loud moments while reading "Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach", and many more giggles. I love the way Jimm and her compatriots don't just go with the flow, they herd the flow - with varying degrees of success. The plot has several side-stories, or at least they start out as side-stories before they come together. The overall plot theme is racism and the disrespect shown to the Burmese workers who enter Thailand, legally and illegally, to do the jobs no body else wants to do. Once the police determine that the severed head is of a Burmese man, they lose interest in solving the murder. So Jimm needs to solve it herself.
I am a big fan of Colin Cotterill's books. I really love the Dr. Siri Paiboun series (the most excellent 1st is
The Coroner's Lunch
), and now I love the Jimm Juree series. Jimm is a little more crazy than Siri, but all the books have their share of humor and excellent writing. "Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach" is the 2nd Jimm Juree mystery, and I look forward to the 3rd!
Happy Reader
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Top reviews from other countries
Chloedog
Quirky and fun it catches the essence of South Thailand
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 3, 2015
