Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach

The White Lotus meets Stephanie Plum in this tale of murder on a Thai beach, featuring an ex-crime reporter-turned-amateur sleuth.

“Readers new to this series will laugh and enjoy Cotterill’s madcap and zany mystery. . . . The author’s natural gift for irony . . . is to be relished.” —Library Journal

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 . . .

Once a promising crime reporter in Chiang Mai, Jimm Juree moved with her rather eccentric family to a rural village on the coast of southern Thailand. Lamenting the derailing of her career, Jimm wakes up one morning to find a severed head on the beach in front of her family’s ramshackle resort.

The local authorities aren’t remotely interested in the case (perhaps because darker motives are in play), which leaves Jimm, with her retired-cop grandfather as backup, to discover how the poor fellow ended up in that particular condition, on that beach, and why. Along the way, they uncover gruesome tales of piracy, slavery, violence, and murder, and Jimmy again finds herself in the middle of a clash of the sublime and the ridiculous—airport hostages, hand grenades, monkeys, naked policemen—with murder in the balance.

“The second installment of prolific Cotterill’s new series definitely puts the fun in family dysfunction. Jimm . . . rattles steadily to a solution, with many hilarious episodes along the way.” —Kirkus Reviews