Novels set in Asia that combine crime and detection with touches of humor are not especially numerous, but the ones in existence are quite amusing. Topping any such list would be Australian author William Marshall's long-running "Yellowthread Street" series, set in Hong Kong from the mid-1970s. Marshall's final effort appears to have been published just after Hong Kong's 1997 reversion to China. Still in print, they feature madcap situations and memorably eccentric characters, such as a cop of Chinese-Irish ancestry named Christopher O'Yee.
Nuri Vitacchi's "The Feng Shui Detective," reviewed on this page in February 2004, would be another example of this genre.
"Thirty-Three Teeth" is Colin Cotterill's second work featuring 72-year old Dr. Siri Paiboun, a Laotian physician who had studied medicine in France. The setting is Laos in the mid-1970s, shortly after the Communist Pathet Lao overthrew the monarchy in the country's protracted civil war.
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