Former star basketball player Clay Edison has been busy. He's solved a decades-old crime and redeemed an innocent man, earning himself a suspension in the process. Things are getting serious with his girlfriend. Plus his brother is fresh out of prison, bringing with him a whole new set of complications. Then the phone rings in the dead of night. A wild party in a gentrifying East Bay neighborhood. A heated argument that spills into the street. Gunshots....

Coroner Martin Gänsewein's quiet life is interrupted when the ghost of Pascha--the dead man in morgue drawer 4--insists his death was no accident. To get rid of the ghost, Gänsewein must investigate the murder and find the killer.

"Dr. Siri Paiboun, reluctant national coroner of Laos, must discover the identity of a corpse that has been delivered to the morgue in Vientiane. The victim, who was run down in front of the Post Office by a logging truck, turns out to be a retired dentist. He was blind, yet he had come into town on the bus to pick up a letter written in invisible ink which is found in his jacket pocket. Dr. Siri is puzzled by the letter, which seems to be in code...

"Laos, 1979: Dr. Siri Paiboun, the twice-retired ex-National Coroner of Laos, receives an unmarked package in the mail. Inside is a hand-woven pha sin, a colorful traditional skirt worn by women in certain northern Lao tribes. A lovely present, but who sent it to him, and why? And, more importantly, why is there a severed human finger stitched into the sin's lining? Siri is convinced someone is trying to send him a message, and won't let the matter...

"A death threat to Dr. Siri and all his friends sends the ex-coroner down memory lane in the 14th installment of Cotterill's quirky, critically acclaimed series set in 1970s Laos. Vientiane, 1980: Laos is celebrating its fifth anniversary of communist rule, and Dr. Siri and his crew couldn't be less thrilled. But really, things could be a lot worse. Madame Daeng's noodle shop is thriving, Tukta and Geung are on their honeymoon, and Siri and Civilai...

The Communist Pathet Lao has taken over this former French colony. Most of the educated class has fled, but Dr. Siri Paiboun, a Paris-trained doctor whose late wife had been an ardent Communist, remains. And so this 72-year-old physician is appointed state coroner, despite the fact that he has no training or even supplies to use in performing his new task. What he does have is curiosity and integrity. At his age he is not about to let a bunch of ignorant...