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    Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach: A Jimm Juree Mystery
    Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach: A Jimm Juree Mystery
    Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach: A Jimm Juree Mystery
    Ebook316 pages4 hours

    Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach: A Jimm Juree Mystery

    By Colin Cotterill

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach is the second Jimm Juree Mystery from award-winning author Colin Cotterill.

    In rural Thailand, former crime reporter Jimm Juree must grapple with her quirky family, a mysterious mother and daughter on the lam and the small matter of a head on the beach ...

    When Jimm Juree's mother sold the family house and invested in a rundown 'holiday camp' at the southern end of Thailand on the Gulf of Siam, the family had little choice but to follow. Jimm Juree, who was well on her way to achieving her goal of becoming the primary crime reporter for the major daily newspaper in Chiang Mai, is less than thrilled to have lost her job as a reporter and to be stuck in the middle of nowhere where little of interest happens. So it is with mixed feelings that she greets the news that a head has washed up on the beach. It's tragic, of course, but this could be the sort of sensational murder that would get her a byline in a major daily and keep her toehold on her journalism career. Now all she has to do is find out who was murdered, and why.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJun 19, 2012
    ISBN9781250014825
    Author

    Colin Cotterill

    Colin Cotterill (born 2 October 1952) is a London-born teacher, crime writer and cartoonist. Cotterill has dual English and Australian citizenship; however, he currently lives in Southeast Asia, where he writes the award-winning Dr. Siri mystery series set in the People's Democratic Republic of Laos.

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    Reviews for Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach

    3.5/5

    92 ratings19 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Reviewed only for Early Reviewers....even more boring, plastic, and disjointed than the first. The same cast of characters that are supposed to be quirky, funny, and I think they're meant to be entertaining. They're not. They're insipid, stupid, and not worth the time to read this one.I got the audio version for review...It was difficult to follow, the narrator's voice was so sing-song, it was like listening to a Saturday morning cartoon. Too many characters, too little plot, and frankly I think that the country of Thailand deserves a much more robust and positive portrayal than this one.
    • 4/5
      Colin Cotterill is a master at teaching his readers a little about his stomping grounds in SE Asia while giving us interesting characters and a mystery or two to boot.In this series, Jimm Juree, a ex-crime writer, is marooned in a small, rundown beach resort in Thailand with her mother, her body-building brother, and her grandfather, an ex-traffic police officer. It is monsoon season with heavy rains and on-shore winds that blow garbage up on their beach. While walking their dogs one morning, Jimm comes upon a head. Sensing she may have been gifted with a story worthy of being published, she contacts the police and is then confronted with the extremely odd system of how bodies are handled in Thailand, graft is involved.The lesson we are taught, along with Jimm, is the problem of Burmese immigrants who, like our own Mexicans, take the worst jobs for the worst pay, but unlike our Mexicans, receive no education for their children or health care. Frequently they are abducted off the street and taken to large fishing vessels, worked to death, and discarded like a worn pair of shoes, to be washed up on the beach. Jimm is irate by this shameful practice and spearheads an attack. I recommend this book to fans of mysteries that take place in foreign settings with a wonderful cast of characters.
    • 4/5
      Much deeper than the first book in the series! It is still a great mystery but there are some darker issues addressed in this second book.
    • 3/5
      Colin Cotterill usually manages combine crime and comedy successfully in both of his series of books. Certainly his Dr. Siri series are better overall,but his first Jimm Juree came over well too.This second one starts well with Jimm finding the head of the title,and investigating how and why it got there. As the book progresses the story leaves comedy and crime and moves into the area of farce. By the end I had largely lost interest and merely hoped for a quick release. A pity as you can usually count on Cotterill for a great story.
    • 4/5
      "Granddad" is the 2nd in Colin Cotterill's Jimm Juree series, about a journalist/detective and her wacky family living in a beach resort south of Bangkok. The head is found early on in the story and there is little interest in identifying it. But Jimm plunges on, while getting mixed up in another mystery concerning two of their guests, a young woman and her mother, both named Noy - who appear to be hiding out. Jimm becomes involved with the local Burmese community in the course of her investigation, neighbors who are looked down upon by their Thai hosts, and consequently relegated to the most menial of jobs. All this leads to slavery, murder, and adventure on the high seas. Without revealing much more, I'll just add that the internet plays a very integral and somewhat unique role in the grand finale. There are tons of cute and sometimes funny one-liners here, perhaps a bit too much at times. But the central issue is a serious one, and the reader will probably come away with a better understanding of life in this part of the world, warts and all. I'll read the 3rd in the series and look forward to it.
    • 3/5
      This book started off slowly, to a protagonist with a painful internal monologue. While technically well written (this is not trash writing at all), I really had trouble getting in to both the story and the characters. The first person narration failed to really connect me to the speaker, I felt a little confused about her facts even halfway through the book. On the good side, it is different. The setting, the bad guys, the sociopolitical issues, and the 'reality of not-so-charming Thailand' is something I can say I have not read before. Somehow, while all this should have gripped me, it didn't!Maybe just not the book for me.
    • 4/5
      This is the second Jimm Juree novel, and while Cotterill seemed slow to develop his style in the first novel—Killed at the Whim of a Hat—here he has no problem. From page 1, he’s off and running with the current breathless, youthful style of short sentences, sentence fragments, funny digressions, and wonderfully timely and imaginative metaphors. And he still manages to embed political commentaries and human rights issues that affect Thailand today, but without being obvious or preachy. This plot (and subplot and another subplot) has many LOL moments and long, drawn-out chuckles in store for you. The words “farce” and “ridiculous” will keep cropping up in your mind, yet it all fits, and there’s even a surprise ending (so I advise not reading ahead). And of course, the karaoke . . . well, you’ll just have to experience it yourself. Read this book!
    • 4/5
      “Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach” is, as the title suggests, a somewhat quirky murder mystery that some might consider belongs in the ‘cozy’ subgenre of mysteries. This would be wrong as cozies rarely have a cast that includes transgender beauty queen hackers, body-building baby brothers, gay policemen and somewhat senile mothers likely to spout such priceless lines as “It’s been such a long time since my last S&M experience, and that was with the clergy” at the most inopportune moments. (If that line doesn’t get a smile out of you, wait until you get to the author’s collection of fractured pop lyrics as performed by Thai cover bands. My favorite is George Harrison’s classic ‘Something in the way she moos’.)This book is the second adventure of former crime reporter Jimm Juree who runs, with her family in a somewhat rundown resort in the rural area of South Thailand. I haven’t read the first book, “Killed at the Whim of a Hat” but didn’t feel as if that hindered my appreciation of this book. I have a couple concerns but they are minor and don’t keep me from recommending this book. The first is that the mystery of the aforementioned head on the beach is not really solved in the traditional sense that readers of mysteries expect. I understand the author’s reasoning behind this but just thought I’d warn those who expect the five Ws (who, what, when, where & why) to be answered. My second concern is that the book mixes light-hearted zaniness with the deadly serious topic of the kidnapping and enslaving of Burmese immigrants to Thailand. The mix of comedy and tragedy comes off as a bit off-kilter.This review is based on the audio recording by Kim Mai Guest whose voice is heard often in animated videos and videogames. She did an excellent job with this story although her voice sounds a bit younger than her character which is surprising seeing as she is older than her character.Bottom line: I enjoyed it and recommend it. *Quotations are cited from an advanced reading copy and may not be the same as appears in the final published edition. The review copy of this book was obtained from the publisher via the LibraryThing Early Reader Program.
    • 4/5
      This is the second entry in Cotterill's series about Jimm Juree, a crime reporter who moves with her family from Chiang Mai to a village in southern Thailand. These books have similar tone to his Dr. Siri series, but perhaps even more tongue-in-cheek. I suspect listeners/readers will either love it or hate it. The plot in "Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach" is tighter and better planned than in book #1 (Killed at the Whim of a Hat), and the characters are becoming more well-rounded. My only quibble with Jimm's characterization is the backtracking Cotterill seems to have done. At the end of book #1, she had become much happier about her life in Maprao, but at the beginning of book #2, she seems to have slid back into her bitterness about rural v urban life, her old job v the family-run business, and so on. It only bothered me a little. If this is the way every book begins, though, I might start to wonder.... The narrator for this audiobook does a fine job, although at times she was working too hard to enunciate and not enough on the characterizations. Overall, however, this was a worthy second entry! I recommend it to those who like their mysteries light and fun with some sarcasm.
    • 3/5
      I tried... really I did, but I just couldn't ever get into this book. I was listening to the audiobook version, and the narrator was passable, but not great. The story was certainly heartwarming, but I found it generally boring. I felt the characters were warm, but not particularly interesting. I finished the book with a resounding "blah". I am certain that fans of cozy mysteries will find this book much more enjoyable than myself. But it really didn't work for me.
    • 3/5
      An enjoyable book, read effectively by Kim Mai Guest. Compared to Cotterill's other series (Dr. Siri Paiboun, national coroner of 1970s Laos) this story has more humor and light-heartedness. It brings the reader to a place unfamiliar to most: modern-day Thailand. As with the Dr. Siri series, this story is shaped by the country's political and social challenges.The last quarter of the book does not lend itself well to being read aloud, though. It contains a lot of short, choppy dialog, as the main character (Jimm Juree, a mid-20s journalist) dictates a screenplay by radiophone to let the authorities and her confederates know what's happening. This may not have been the best narrative vehicle for advancing the story through a tense climax. Jimm Juree is a delightful investigator and crime-fighter: energetic, modern in a not-quite-modern world, intelligent, and creative. I will definitely seek out the first book in this series and wait eagerly for more to be published.
    • 4/5
      This is the second in a new series by Colin Cotterill of Dr. Siri fame, set in Thailand in modern time. I enjoyed the first in the series ~ "Killed at the Whim of a Hat" ~ but this one just didn't grab me, and I am not exactly sure why. Perhaps because there was a bit of preachiness in it? Perhaps because I never really connected with any of the characters, including the main one, Jimm Juree, a Thai crime reporter who has been unwillingly transplanted to a small resort far from Bangkok. Perhaps because it was a bit all-over-the-place, the story was a bit over-the-top, there wasn't really much mystery to it, though there were actually two "mysteries" in the novel. Anyway, it fell flat for me and I'm glad I'm finished with it and probably won't want to listen to it again, though I will read the next in the series and hope Cotterill's gotten back on track writing quirky and humorous mysteries by then.
    • 1/5
      Where to begin...... The main character, Jimm Juree, is suppose to be a 34 year old single Thai woman reporter, living w/ her family @ a dilapidated beach resort. Her Granddad is a former Traffic Officer, who sits & watches local traffic and counts violations all day. Her brother helps around the resort (and I forget what else) and is in love w/ a female body-builder his mothers' age. Her mother haphazardly runs the resort, which is now in the midst of a monsoon.

      Jimm finds a man's head on the beach and the clean-up-crew are fierce mean men.... who don't want anyone looking into his death......

      Then there is the girl & her mother who happen upon the resort & insist on staying there (hiding something) who are not who they say they are.

      So it goes on, and I had to stop @ page 132..... To put it nicely, this was so very tedious.

      There was one part that was very objectionable: "The hounds were forty meters from the debris. They were excited. When Gogo comes across something that confuses her, she whimpers and does a sort of canine Native-American war dance." What sort of insensitive culturally deficient gormless prat writes something like that? Oh yeah: "Born in London, Colin Cotterill has worked as a teacher in Israel, Australia, the United States and japan before he started training teachers in Thailand........" That about says it all, an erudite European educated male, writing in as a female persona he has never personally been.
    • 5/5
      It should be no surprise to anyone that Colin Cotterill's way with words has translated easily from the Laos of the 1970s in his Dr. Siri Paiboun mysteries to modern-day Thailand. From the mind of a wily and rebellious old Communist, we now get to enjoy following Jimm Juree, a Westernized Thai woman who has a talent for rooting out stories and surviving one family calamity after another. Although I love Cotterill's humor-- and there is plenty to be found here-- he also deals with serious topics such as corrupt policemen and the plight of poor Burmese citizens coming to Thailand in hopes of work. Even that mysterious mother and daughter staying at the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant have important things to teach us. Each of these topics blend into the story seamlessly and add their own elements of suspense and danger. The first book in the series, Killed at the Whim of a Hat, angered some American readers by using flubbed lines from speeches made by former President George Bush as chapter headings. Even though those quotes tied into the story, the perceived insult to a president was not appreciated. This time, Cotterill heads each chapter with a line from a song that has been phonetically translated by Thai karaoke and lounge singers. Several are absolutely hilarious, and the author does provide the correct lyrics at the back of the book. Once again, these lyrics do tie into the story, and this time in a very exciting way. Clint Eastwood also plays a part, but you'll have to read Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach to find out what it is.Colin Cotterill has long been a favorite of mine for teaching me how other cultures perceive the world, for his sense of humor, and for his storytelling ability. It's my hope that you'll read his books and come to a similar appreciation.
    • 3/5
      Imagine Stephanie Plum’s dysfunctional family transplanted to Thailand and you get some idea of the cast of characters inhabiting this comic mystery. Unfortunately, for me the humor fell a bit flat and the mystery was rather elementary. The narrator/protagonist, investigative reporter Jimm Jurree is involved in two unconnected plot lines, one featuring women in hiding and the other concerning the Burmese slave trade. Most of the investigation actually is done by Jimm’s transsexual brother and her friend, a gay policeman. Jimm puts the pieces together, spearheads the rescue of a boatload of Burmese slaves, and gives the hiding women a way out of their predicament. The most engaging features of the audio book were the excellent reading by Kim Mai Guest and the glimpse into Thai culture and a real human rights issue that author Cotterill provides.
    • 4/5
      Grandad, There’s a Head on the Beach is the second title in Colin Cotterill’s new Thailand mystery series starring crime reporter Jimm Juree. In Grandad Jimm has left Bangkok and is helping her mother, grandfather and brother run a rundown resort on the Thai coast when she finds a severed human head washed up on the beach nearby. Jimm cannot accept the cursory explanations of the local police and begins using her contacts to investigate this bizarre event.The plot of Grandad is not so much a mystery as a vehicle for painting a colorful picture of modern Thailand with its culture clash of royal, peasant, native and immigrant populations residing in bustling cities and backwater villages. The narrative also focuses on the native prejudice against the illegal Burmese immigrants and the abuse they are forced to endure. The profusion of odd characters, enhanced by Jimm’s observations, include (but are certainly not limited to) a gay police lieutenant, a mother-daughter duo traveling incognito, a mangy dog, and a sister?? who can hack just about any computer system to get information for Jimm’s investigation. Adding to Jimm’s often facetious commentary are the corrupted verses from popular songs of the 60s and 70s that head each chapter. Eventually this strange tale culminates in a hysterically funny showdown on the high seas between a determined and fearless Jimm with her assorted “deputies” and a crew of organized kidnappers that is well worth the price of the sometimes plodding narrative. Fans of Carl Hiasson will feel right at home in this crazy, hilarious romp set on the coast of the country formerly known as Siam. The narrator of the audio version, Kim Mai Guest, has an Asian accent that is almost too pleasant; It’s easy to become lulled by her voice and lose focus on the narrative. Also, the large array of characters means listeners should to pay close attention to names and relationships at the start to avoid confusion later.
    • 4/5
      The second in the Jimm Juree series (as distinct form the author's other great creation, Laos-based Dr. Siri), this is yet another wonderful, entertaining, humour-full, fast-paced mystery read from Cotterill. Jimm, the Thai female main character, is a feisty, smart, fun character, and the supporting cast are equally colourful. I love how Thailand itself is intrinsic to the story, as Laos is in the Dr. Siri series. Plot as ever is so well done, looking forward as ever to the author's next.
    • 2/5
      I received this book from Library Thing Early Reviewers in exchange for a review.Not sure about this one. The second in a series set in modern rural Thailand featuring former crime reporter Jimm Juree. There were a lot of funny parts in here, but it was pretty over the top as well. The quirky parts didn't really mix well with the serious theme of the problem of Burmese immigrants. I did enjoy the reader for this one. I think she did a great job. But overall, I guess this one just wasn't for me.
    • 5/5
      This is the 2nd installment of the Jimm Juree mystery series set in southern Thailand.I simply adore the characters in this series! Book 1, "Killed at the Whim of a Hat" was such a pleasant surprise to me and this book, book #2, was even better.Jimm Juree used to be a crime reporter for a major newspaper when her slightly senile mother sold everything and bought a run down resort in southern Thailand. The family had no choice but to follow her. Jimm feels like she is suffocating because so little happens at her new home. So when mysteries come her way she jumps at solving them. (In this case it begins with finding a head on their beach.) But she's never alone in her adventures. She has the help of her mother, her former policeman granddad, her police friend Champu, her bodybuilding brother Arny and her former brother-now-sister Sissee.Now that I am getting better acquainted with Jimm's eccentric family I found myself laughing out loud several times because of their antics. Jimm's family really loves and cares about each other in spite of their unique traits, which is heartwarming. But the mystery brings a lot of danger and suspense too, making this book a real page turner. I also enjoy getting to know Thailand a little better since these are the first books I've ever read which are set in Thailand. (I also listened to the audio version and it was very well done, it really helped me learn to pronounce the unfamiliar words and brought the story to life.)I would definitely recommend this book, and this series to other mystery lovers, although I'd recommend you read them in order.

    Book preview

    Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach - Colin Cotterill

    1.

    Slipping on the Dog

    (from Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head—BURT BACHARACH)

    Grandad?

    He didn’t so much as look up. He had a lot of problems, did Grandad. Deafness wasn’t one of them. Ignorance was. He feigned the former to achieve the latter.

    Grandad?

    He knew I was there, but I admit I’d chosen a bad time to get through to him. It was the morning rush hour in downtown Maprao and he had traffic to examine. As the fishermen traveled to or from their boats, a lot of them stopped off at Jiep’s rice porridge stall across the street. Six thirty was as busy as it would ever get. He sat beside the road in his white undervest and his Fred Flintstone shorts and he tsssked and tutted at the passing vehicles. Like an ex-matador might sit on a farm fence glaring at a bull, pondering how, in his prime he would have demeaned and disfigured the beast, so Grandad gave the evil eye to every passing truck and motorcycle sidecar. There weren’t that many, but every one of them flouted the highway code in one way or another. Grandad knew every regulation. He’d been a traffic policeman for forty years, and then for fourteen more years he’d subscribed to the Royal Thai Police Force Road Users’ Gazette to keep up with amendments. He was a living compendium of petty legislation: probably the most knowledgeable man on the subject in Chumphon province, if not the whole country. We’d often urged him to send in an application to Channel Five’s Genuine Fan, where people who’d spent their entire lives focused on something utterly useless—combative stag beetles, designer handbags, English Premiership football results and the like—had a chance to answer questions on their chosen specialty and win a refrigerator. Grandad Jah would have had a fleet of Toshiba freezers by now.

    I glared at him, still hoping for a response. It was like waiting for Cro-Magnon man to evolve. I wondered what use we might have found for him if he’d invested his vast memory on nuclear physics rather than traffic regulations.

    In rural Thailand it’s unlikely anyone would know the first thing about the rules of the road, especially not the police. If you were too poor to front up to the Motor Car License division with a generous bottle of whiskey and a wink (in which case your license would be expedited), you’d be asked to fill out a multiple choice quiz whose correct answers were well indented on the pad from the previous twenty applicants. You’d then drive your vehicle to a tree, beneath which the examiner sat. He or she would ask you to park. If you managed to do so without knocking over the tree or hitting the examiner, you had a license. The few people who knew the rules were at a disadvantage down here. The north–south highway, Route 41, passes through Chumphon, and it’s the most dangerous stretch of road in the country. All those righteous smart-alecs from Bangkok who learned when to signal politely and how to adjust their hands at the ten-to-two position on the steering wheel were invariably sideswiped by unlit coconut-carrying pickups coming at them at full speed in the wrong direction. Arrogance is punished in Chumphon.

    So, anyway, there I was trying to get Grandad’s attention for a matter I considered to be infinitely more urgent than traffic.

    Grandad, I called in an irritating screechy voice. There’s a head on the beach.

    If that didn’t grab him, nothing would. He’d been glaring at a truck with conflicting plates. The one on the back was handwritten on cardboard. The number at the front was different. It was a traffic policeman’s nirvana, but I got a dab of eye contact before his attention returned to the truck.

    A head of what? he asked quietly.

    What?

    Head of fish?

    He always spoke slowly and enunciated like a teacher at a special school. Despite the fact that I was a moderately sane thirty-four-year-old Thai woman, he often talked to me as if I was a mentally challenged youth.

    Head of dog? he continued. Head of cabbage?

    Head of man, I said, as calmly as I could under the very annoying circumstances. It’s always a bother to decide who to tell when you find a head on the beach. I mean, there is no protocol. And when I say always here, I may be exaggerating somewhat because I can’t say I’ve stumbled over too many heads on my morning dog walks. I’d seen body parts in morgues, of course, and accident scenes, but that Wednesday was my first detached head. It upset me that it hadn’t upset me enough.

    My inner alarm clock had woken me up at six, as was its habit. It doesn’t have an inner snooze button, so I got up. This was not a habit born out of a desire to watch the sunrise or to frolic gaily along the sand with my doggy friends. It was a habit begat by the fact that there was absolutely nothing to do at night in the mulch pit we’d arrived in a year earlier. Maprao means coconut, and that pretty much sums the place up: thick skinned, dull as dirt, and containing nothing of substance. I’m spending too much time here on sidetracks and making a mess of what should be a tense and exciting opening to my story, so I’ll save all the gripes and family intrigues for later.

    Back to the beach. We had two dogs. Or perhaps I should say the two dogs had us because there were no walls to keep them in. They arrived at mealtimes from whatever mischief they’d embroiled themselves in, and would deign to sleep at our modest seaside resort—or not. Unfortunately, whenever I opened my cabin door of a morning, there they would be; wagging. Gogo, bitch in every sense of the word, was one of my mother’s roadside rescues. No manners. No gratitude. No intestines. She ate like a horse and defecated like a cow. Our vet, Dr. Somboon, who was fortunately a livestock specialist, told us that Gogo was physically unable to digest. So we gave her a mountain of food every day in the expectation that a small hillock of it might find its way to her muscles. That had not yet happened.

    Dog two: Sticky Rice, white, one enormous black eye, had been a temple pup. He was a thief. Not yet seven months of age, but no excuse. Were he a human teenager, he would be under lock and key at a juvenile correctional facility. No shoe was safe in front of the guest rooms. No bottom-shelf instant noodle pack, no drying squid, no garden vegetable. He had them all. And, cunning beast, he left no evidence because he ate everything: leaves, packets, laces. He gave a new definition to the word consumable. If you’ve never seen a dog chew through a breeze block and not spit out the crumbs, you’ve not met Sticky.

    All right. I’m lost again. So, there we were, on the beach. The wind du jour was just starting to roll the polystyrene blocks like tumbleweeds. Plastic bags were being thrown up by the tide. There was nothing pleasurable about our amble, but my mother, Mair, insisted I walk the dogs twice a day—as if they didn’t have legs and minds of their own. It was November, so you could barely make out any sand under all the garbage. Urban dwellers who have a river passing behind their houses see it as a sort of free, convenient, garbage-disposal system. Toss a plastic bag full of diapers into it and voilà, it’s gone. Nature is truly a wonder. All that disgusting junk gets spewed out of the Lang Suan River estuary and obligingly sent to our bay via the incoming monsoon tides. The dogs love garbage days because there are obviously so many more nutrients in putrid fish and half-drunk cartons of congealed chocolate milk than there are in the extortionately expensive Pedigree Chum that Mair feeds them.

    The hounds were forty meters ahead and they’d found something among the debris. They were excited. When Gogo comes across something that confuses her, she whimpers and does a sort of canine native-American war dance. When Sticky comes across the unexpected, he eats it. But it was obviously too big to eat because he was doing the forward-backward tango and barking the hell out of it. As I got closer, I thought a rubber mask had been washed up on the tide. A face stared at me with one of those frightening Hallowe’en expressions. I decided it would be a lot of fun to take it back to the resort and scare the daylights out of my little brother. I even got close enough to reach down to pick it up. And then I realized.

    My sister and I have it in mind to one day become wealthy by writing screenplays for movies. A couple of months earlier I’d sent off treatments to our hero Clint Eastwood in Carmel, California. He has a movie company called Malpaso Productions. They unequivocally do not accept movie treatments by e-mail. This is to be expected as not only do they not have an e-mail address, they also don’t even have a Web site. How much more secure does a man have to be in his own omnipotence than to spurn the Internet? How can you not love such a man? No harassment from annoying amateurs taking up his valuable time. No groupies. Clint is an unapproachable guy unless you happen to have a former brother who’s an Internet criminal. Sissi handles the Web like a .44 magnum. Through some basic hacking exercises that I’m told any third-grader can do, Sissi found the top-secret e-mail address of Clint’s personal assistant, Liced. I’ve only ever seen that written down, so I have no idea how you’d pronounce it. I’m leaning toward Liced as in full of lice. But anyway, Sissi began a line of communication with Liced that initially entailed my sister saying how lucky Liced was to be working with Clint, and Liced telling her to get off her personal e-mail or she’d file a harassment suit. But as often happens in these stalking relationships, animosity turned to friendship. Their relationship was cemented when Sissi sent a kilogram of cat’s whisker herbal capsules when she learned from the lady’s private medical file that she had kidney stones. It was a birthday present. Liced was overwhelmed, and it was through this back passageway that we submitted our treatments and you’re probably wondering what the hell all this has to do with a head on the beach. Right? Well, you’d be perfectly within your rights to be irritated. Here it is.

    My first reaction on seeing a decapitated head on the beach should have been Oh, my God. [Scream optional as there was nobody around to hear it.] How awful, etc. Whereas, in fact, the opening scene of a movie flashed into my mind.

    EXT-COCONUT BEACH—EARLY MORNING

    A beautiful Asian girl is jogging along a pristine white sand beach with Tin Tin her golden retriever at her side. The sweat causes her flimsy T-shirt to cling to her pert breasts offering a suggestion of nipples. Not so obvious as to alienate the censor early on, but enough to pull in half a million horny teenage boys once they’ve seen the trailer. She stumbles over a severed head on the sand …

    It needed work. I mean she’d have to be blind not to notice a head on a pristine beach. Perhaps I could make Tin Tin a guide dog. But the point was … the head had set off my imagination long before it occurred to me I should have been repulsed by it. I hoped with all my tiny little heart that this was a psychological defense mechanism. That my subconscious was blanking out the horror of my discovery and replacing it with a screenplay. All being well, I’d burst into tears and be inconsolable later.

    I studied him. Head. Male. Thirties. Maybe younger without the wave-buffeting and salt water puckering. Two earrings on his left ear. Long hair wrapped around him like seaweed. A No! For God’s sake, don’t do it expression on his waxy face. Propped against a shoe. It’s astounding, but our beach is a single-shoe repository. A lot of one-legged people come to Maprao to supplement their shoe supplies. Our head leaned against a pale green platform clog at such an angle as to suggest a possibility—a vague and distant possibility—that the rest of the body was buried at attention beneath it like a Chinese terracotta warrior. Given the number of years it had taken to inter a terracotta warrior, I rather doubted it, but a good investigative journalist didn’t leave anything to chance. I poked it with a stick.

    It was a mistake on a number of levels because the head spun around to stare glassily straight into my face. The mouth dropped a fraction, as if to begin a speech, and a crab walked out. My heart took refuge behind my sternum for a brief moment. Sensing my distress, Sticky jumped in to protect me. He grabbed our head by the nose and started to shake it. It was very brave of him, and I’d like to believe he was acting as my bodyguard rather than merely starting breakfast early. But when Grandad Jah accompanied me to the beach twenty minutes later, that was the reason our head was covered with a plastic laundry basket with a rock on top of it. I called it the preservation of evidence. I removed the basket and took photographs of the head from several angles with my cell phone while Grandad sat cross-legged on the beach.

    You think he was attacked by a shark? I asked.

    I often plied Grandad with theories I already knew the answers to. It made him feel superior and got his creative juices flowing. It might seem odd that I should consult a traffic cop on matters related to head severance, but deep down Grandad had been a real policeman in the Western sense. He would probably have been a great detective if only he’d allowed himself to accept the odd bribe every now and then. Corruption was a necessary stepping stone along the pathway to promotion in the Thai police force. How could anybody have faith in an honest policeman? None of his colleagues could trust him. There’s probably some whistle-blower joke I could put in here, but I really have to keep track of the story. All I need to say is that after forty years in the force, he had reached the humble rank of corporal and, without those odd baksheesh bonuses, pretty much survived from the proceeds from our family shop in Chiang Mai. If only he’d dived into the slush I know he could have been somebody. He had a marvelous policeman’s instinct.

    No, he said.

    On the negative side, getting words out of him was like waiting for a whale to give birth.

    No what?

    Unless the shark was carrying a saber—he took time out to sigh at my ignorance—this had nothing to do with sea creatures.

    I admit the neck wound was very neat, but I knew first impressions could be deceptive. I suppose I still had in mind the foreigner a few months earlier who’d put a plastic bag over his head, tied a rope around his neck, and jumped off a bridge. The noose had snared and the body had snapped clean off and continued down into the river. All that remained was a head in a plastic bag at the end of a rope. For weeks the police believed it was a Mafia revenge killing. But the pathologist confirmed it was all due to gravity. Heads are obviously not as well connected as we’d like to believe.

    Why’s that? I asked.

    He gave me the look.

    Think, Jimm, think. First, in spite of what the Thai cinema would have us believe, there aren’t really that many creatures in the sea that rip people apart for the hell of it. Sharks are the most feared deep-sea psychopaths, but they are actually a rather maligned creature. In fact, they would prefer to hoover up plankton rather than go to the trouble of chewing on human gristle. If we don’t bother them, they don’t eat us. Simple as that. There’s more likelihood of being hit on the head by a bullet fired into the air during a celebration than there is of being attacked by a shark. Second, the tissue and vertebrae of the neck is especially tough. A sea creature would have to shake and gnaw to get through it. There is no bruising here. This was a clean single cut performed by a skilled swordsman.

    So how do you think our friend here wound up on the beach without his body? I asked.

    Grandad shimmied across the sand and, to my amazement, picked up the head and turned it over, like an antique dealer looking for a manufacture date.

    Sharp knife? he said. Machete? Sword? Don’t know. I wasn’t a forensic scientist. I directed traffic.

    I switched my cell phone to CALL mode and started to search for a number.

    Who are you calling? he asked.

    Police.

    He always assumed this lemony expression whenever I mentioned the police.

    Just go and tell Headman Beung, he said.

    It turned out there was a protocol after all, and who better to deal with heads than the head man? I learned later that bodies and parts thereof washed up on the beach was not an unusual phenomenon. There were regulations about it posted on the clubhouse wall at the trawlermen’s recreation facility. A surprising number of fishermen couldn’t swim, and an even higher number imbibed stimulants of various kinds to stay awake through the night. A quart of Red Bull might just convince a man he was a dolphin. On the Gulf here, you’d need to get those images of eight-meter waves washing over the deck of pirate ships out of your mind. Three meters was our perfect storm, and you could roll over that in a rubber inner tube quite safely. We aren’t ever going to see a tidal wave on the east coast. But every now and then a man might step over the side and be lost in the shadows of the squid spotlights.

    On the occasion of encountering a dead body on the beach, the discoverer shall inform the village headman. (Regulation 11b)

    In our case, this was Pooyai Beung. Pooyai literally translates as big person. So I sarcastically call him Bigman, in English, ’cause he’s not. I’ve never had cause to put Beung on a scale, but if I ever did, I doubt he’d weigh much more than a haddock. He’s in his sixties but remarkably upright. He dyes his sticky-up hair light brown, so he reminds me of a paintbrush. He has one wife here at home in Maprao, another lesser wife in Grajom Fy near the crematorium, and a girlfriend in Lang Suan. I doubt he has the stamina to trouble any of them between the sheets, but I don’t suppose that was the point of his assembling his harem. 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 alert 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. I doubt he’s ever seen military service, but it seems anyone down here can dress up any way they like. On top of his uniform fetish and his odd looks, Bigman Beung is a sleazeball. So, it was with great reluctance that I rode Mair’s shopping bicycle around the bay to his house.

    Aha! My favorite little starlet, he said. Just in time. I was starting to feel a bit stiff. How’s your massage skills?

    He was lounging on a wooden recliner on the balcony in front of his house. He was wearing a military cadet jacket and unrelated shorts. He had a can of Leo beer at his elbow. It was seven A.M. His major wife was a few meters away from him, plucking chickens. A woman built like an industrial washing machine. I’d never heard her speak.

    "Pooyai Beung, there’s a head on the beach," I said.

    Just here, he continued, pulling up one leg of his shorts to reveal a cadaverous thigh. Real knotted it is. Must of pulled a muscle. Few minutes of massage should loosen it up … if it doesn’t have the opposite effect. Hee hee.

    I doubted very much he had any muscles, and I was starting to wonder whether he had ears. Hadn’t I just told him there was a head on the beach? I tried again.

    Beung, listen. There’s a human head just down from our resort. Washed up on the beach. I described it.

    He smiled and his upper denture dropped like a guillotine. He used his tongue to push it back up.

    Got legs, has it? he asked.

    What?

    This head of yours. Has it got legs?

    It’s a head. If it had legs, it’d be a body and I would have said, ‘Beung, there’s a body on the beach.’ What we have is a head. Understand?

    I suppose I should have shown more respect to our headman. There were people in our village who treated him with deference—only dared make fun of him behind his back. But there are thirteen villages in Maprao—population five thousand—and Bigman Beung was the grand overlord of village thirteen. At the most, fifty houses. Not exactly the mayor of New York City. And have I mentioned he’s a sleazeball?

    If it’s got no legs, he said, it isn’t going anywhere, is it? Won’t be running off, will it? Still be there after the savings cooperative meeting. Not urgent, so no reason to call around to all the co-op members to cancel. Am I right?

    Not urgent? I was getting agitated. "It’s somebody’s head. It used to be attached to that somebody’s body. He probably has family concerned about him. He could have been the victim of a murder. The perpetrator’s walking around this very minute looking for victim number two. And all because nobody’s reported a death. Doesn’t that worry

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