Axe Factor - Hardcover

Colin Cotterill was born and raised in London. He has taught in Australia, the USA and Japan. After working with an NGO and child protection services in Southeast Asia, Colin settled in Thailand, where he now writes full time. He has been shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger and has won the CWA Dagger in the Library.

*Starred Review* Jimm Juree is a Thai journalist who feels she’s come down in the world since she had to leave all the excitement of the big city and her position as crime reporter for the Chiang Mai Daily Mail to move with her family to the tiny village of Maprao in southern Thailand. There, she helps her confused and confusing family run a failing country resort on the Gulf of Siam. She freelances and supplements her income by translating Thai into English; each chapter starts with an example of crazed English signs, as in, “Please Leave Your Values at the Front Desk.” The editor at the local paper gives Jimm an assignment to interview Maprao’s most famous farang (European), a Brit who writes best-selling crime novels. Dramatic irony is used exquisitely throughout. For example, the reader knows what Jimm doesn’t know about the crime author who is cleaving watermelons with an ax when she first meets him: he uses his ax on much more than watermelons. As Jimm is falling under the author’s spell, and coming ever closer to being cleaved herself, she’s also investigating the disappearance of several women in the area. In addition to a clockwork plot and an intriguing setting, what really makes this book sing is Jimm’s own caustic, ribald observations. A stunner of a novel, third in the Jimm Juree series by the author of the acclaimed Dr. Siri novels. --Connie Fletcher