Supervising an excavation for the remains of a U.S. fighter pilot who crashed in a northern Laos jungle a decade earlier, national coroner Dr. Siri becomes suspicious when a series of fatal accidents culminates in his team getting trapped in a cabin.

"Dr. Siri Paiboun, the spry seventy-three-year-old reluctant national coroner of Laos, is out of town when a booby-trapped corpse is delivered to the morgue in Vientiane. The lives of visiting doctors, the morgue attendants, and Madame Daeng, Dr. Siri's fiancee, are saved by the intervention of Nurse Dtui, the doctor's longtime assistant, but it is a near thing. Who is responsible for this outrage?" "On his way back from a Communist Party meeting...