Dr. Siri never really wanted to be Laos's national coroner. And now that he is in his mid-70s, he longs to spend some time with his wife before the untimely death that is sure to befall him, according to the local transvestite fortune-teller. But retirement will have to wait (again) until he has completed one last job for the Lao government: supervising an excavation for the remains of a US fighter pilot who went down in the remote northern Lao jungle ten years earlier. And the stakes are high. The presence of American soldiers in Laos is controversial, and the search party includes high-level politicians and scientists. So when a member of the party is found dead, Dr. Siri suspects it may not have been an accident. Can Dr. Siri get to the bottom of the MIA pilot's mysterious story before the body count rises and the fortune-teller's prediction comes true?