The Axe Factor: A Jimm Juree Mystery
5/5
()
About this ebook
The Axe Factor is the third Jimm Juree mystery from award-winning author Colin Cotterill.
Since Jimm Juree moved, under duress, with her family to a rural village on the coast of Southern Thailand, she misses the bright lights of Chiang Mai. Most of all, she's missed her career as a journalist, which was just getting started. In Chiang Mai, she was covering substantial stories and major crimes. But here in Maprao, Jimm has to scrape assignments from the local online journal, the Chumphon Gazette—and be happy about it when she gets one. This time they are sending her out to interview a local farang (European) writer, a man in his late fifties, originally from England, who writes award-winning crime novels, one Conrad Coralbank.
At the same time, several local women have left town without a word to anyone, leaving their possessions behind. These include the local doctor, Dr. Sumlak, who never returned from a conference, and the Thai wife of that farang writer, the aforementioned Conrad Coralbank. All of which looks a little suspicious, especially to Jimm's grandfather, an ex-cop, who notices Coralbank's interest in Jimm with a very jaundiced eye. With a major storm headed their way and a potential serial killer on the loose, it looks like Jimm Juree, her eccentric family, and the whole town of Maprao is in for some major changes.
Colin Cotterill
Born in London, Colin Cotterill has worked as teacher in Israel, Australia, the U.S. and Japan before he started training teachers in Thailand. Cotterill and his wife live in a small fishing village on the Gulf of Siam in Southern Thailand. He has won the Dilys and a CWA Dagger and has been a finalist for several other awards. His Jimm Juree Mysteries include Killed at the Whim of a Hat; Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach, and The Axe Factor.
Read more from Colin Cotterill
Jimm Juree Box Set: The Jimm Juree Case Files 1 - 5 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bleeding in Black and White Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJimm Juree Box Set 2: The Jimm Juree Case Files 6 - 10 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Amok Runners Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Evil in the Land Without Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Pool and its Role in Asian Communism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Famous Last Selfies Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to The Axe Factor
Titles in the series (3)
Killed at the Whim of a Hat: A Jimm Juree Mystery Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach: A Jimm Juree Mystery Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Axe Factor: A Jimm Juree Mystery Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related ebooks
Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach: A Jimm Juree Mystery Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Killed at the Whim of a Hat: A Jimm Juree Mystery Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Number Twelve: Lost Property Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Number Eleven: Whale Vomit Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Number One: The Funeral Photographer Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Number Ten: Tom Tom Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Number Nine: Maprao Syndrome Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Number Seven: Sex on the Beach Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAkitada's Holiday: Akitada Mysteries Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Case of the Love Commandos: From the Files of Vish Puri, India's Most Private Investigator Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book Artist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Singapore School of Villainy: Inspector Singh Investigates Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Women of the Souk, The Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul: Inspector Singh Investigates Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pool and its Role in Asian Communism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Number Three: Highway Robbery Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Sorbonne Affair: A Hugo Marston Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hold Your Breath, China Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summertime, All the Cats Are Bored Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Number Four: The Zero Finger Option Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Waters of Eternal Youth Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Winter Swallows Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsKicking Dogs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Azabu Getaway Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Tokyo Zangyo Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNumber Eight: Smelly Man Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Mystery For You
The Stories of Ray Bradbury Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hunting Party: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hallowe'en Party: Inspiration for the 20th Century Studios Major Motion Picture A Haunting in Venice Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Paris Apartment: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5None of This Is True: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pretty Girls: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Short Stories Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Still Life: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5False Witness: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Last Flight: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sydney Rye Mysteries Box Set Books 10-12: Sydney Rye Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Pieces of Her: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Pharmacist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Life We Bury Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The River We Remember: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hidden Staircase: Nancy Drew #2 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Murder Under a Red Moon: A 1920s Bangalore Mystery Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Dark Side: A Collection of Mysteries & Thrillers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summit Lake Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Finlay Donovan Is Killing It: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Club: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dean Koontz: Series Reading Order - with Summaries & Checklist Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Woman in the Library: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Big Sleep Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The People Next Door Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for The Axe Factor
5 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wow - I totally got the murder wrong on this one!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I love this sharply-written and quirky cozy mystery. Jimm Juree is a wonderful character, slyly funny and insightful, with an oddball cast of family and friends to back her up. Set in coastal Thailand, this is a laugh-out-loud funny mystery with plenty of great twists and turns that will keep readers guessing.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Colin Cotterill is one of the sneakiest writers I know. Author of the superb Dr. Siri Paiboun mysteries and now the Jimm Juree mysteries set in rural Thailand, Cotterill is a master at writing books so filled with wit and whimsey that you may not realize that you're actually learning something as you read. With the Jimm Juree books, you learn how a Westernized Thai city girl gets used to life out in the country. You learn about the political atmosphere in Thailand. You learn how poor people survive with no real help from the government. You also learn how a family-- rather bizarrely comprised of a mother with dementia, a retired traffic cop grandfather who seldom speaks, a twentysomething bodybuilder son who's in love with a woman bodybuilder in her late fifties, and a daughter who still longs to be a big city crime reporter-- live together, argue with each other, and (most importantly) love each other. And I didn't even mention the sister who's a transsexual former beauty queen and erstwhile computer hacker who refused to move out of the city. As I read each Jimm Juree novel, I wonder if a dysfunctional family like that can love and support each other, why do so many "normal" families have such a problem doing it?With family members like these, you know that Cotterill is playing it for laughs, and there are plenty of those. One of Jimm's part-time jobs is as a translator for anyone who wants their signs accurately translated from Thai to English. Each chapter heading is an example of a poorly translated sign, and they alone are worth the price of admission. Then there's Jimm's ongoing correspondence with Clint Eastwood. She's determined to sell him a screenplay, and I love watching her try to make her dream come true.Cotterill ups the anty in The Axe Factor with two things: a thinly veiled version of himself as Conrad Coralbank, and pages from a serial killer's journal that are truly chilling. No laughs where those pages are concerned because Cotterill can do scary very well, too. As Jimm falls deeper under Coralbank's spell, and as her grandfather becomes more suspicious, those journal pages are enough to really make readers fear for Jimm's life-- and it's a life that we become better acquainted with in this book, particularly her insecurities.The Axe Factor is the perfect blend of chills and laughter-- and one of the best examples of misdirection I've ever read. It also ends with a nice little cliffhanger. On the surface, Cotterill's books all appear to be light and breezy, but don't be fooled; there's real depth to be found in them as well. I make it a habit never to miss a single one.
Book preview
The Axe Factor - Colin Cotterill
UNPOSTED BLOG ENTRY 1
(found two weeks too late)
I write.
It’s how I earn my living. I used to think there were those who wrote and those who performed, as separate as those who dreamed and those who lived their dreams. But tonight I stepped across that line. I graduated from writer of death to taker of life. I’ve never felt as free as I do now. If they arrest me, not that they’re likely to, I couldn’t pretend it was spontaneous: a spur-of-the-moment red rage or passion. I’d imagined it, you see? I’d pictured it vividly in solid oils rather than washed-out watercolors. It had been a recurring multicolored vision for so many years it was only a matter of time before it took on the grisly form of reality.
To give her credit, she hadn’t deserved all this gore. She was no more annoying than most of the women I’ve known. Perhaps she put a little too much effort into thoughts that didn’t warrant thinking. Perhaps she spoke when silence would have been the better option. But in many respects she served me well. Visitors liked her. She made a superb cup of coffee and performed her designated night-time duties to the best of her ability. Were I given more to diplomacy, I might have even been able to resolve these latest troubles without the use of the axe. But there was the question of betrayal, you see? Hard to forgive. So, it had all been decided by the flip of a twenty-pence piece. Heads she lives. Tails she gets hacked to bits. Odd, you might say—the flipping, not the hacking (although perhaps you wouldn’t see the hacking as particularly normal)—but in Thailand, one did not toss a coin of the realm for fear that the regent might be insulted should it land facedown. The Queen of England, on the other hand, had survived far worse indignities, so it was her tail that had condemned my poor woman to the fate of the blade.
And so she lies, the victim, here and there. A foot hither. An elbow thither. Like a kit—an IKEA human being. It’s fascinating to look around and visualize how these parts had once fitted together so neatly. Now look at her. And look at me, all blood-spattered and sweaty. I wish I had the type of cell phone that took pictures. But what an inspiration this has been. Job done, I simply have to transcribe this recorded message to myself, made while the events are still fresh in my mind. While the blood is still crusted on my hands.
First, the process. Consider this a how to
for beginners.
The waterproof groundsheet can never be too large. Six liters of blood spreads a long way. Two layers of black plastic garbage bags upright in a bin for those butcher shop parts one might feed to one’s pigs. And then the cutting order:
A. The vertebrae of the neck to bleed her out.
B. Arms and legs. (Sockets put up surprisingly little resistance to a sharp axe. I’m astounded how crime writers make dismemberment seem so labor-intensive).
C. The legs were a little too long for the box, so a couple of swift hacks to the backs of the kneecaps.
D. The trunk was surprisingly broad, so I had a mind to slice it down the middle by chopping through the sternum; then down through the rib cage. I’d imagined I might invert one side and stack them, one inside the other like swimming pool chaise-longues. But, once separated, they were uncooperative. So I ended up forming four parts by hacking across the lower trunk below the rib cage. That was a workout, I tell you.
E. The other slicing and dicing I have to confess was just for the fascination of it.
To be honest it’s a damned fine feeling. There was something sexual about it. Wickedly perverted. There’s no doubt I shall do it again. We’ll see how cleanly I get away with this one. The average policeman down here has the IQ of a sponge, but I made mistakes. The most prominent was the connection between us. I’m an obvious suspect. And there’s motive. They wouldn’t have to dig too deep to find that. But I do have one or two things going for me. There’s the fact that I’m a foreigner. A better class of foreigner than the desperate laborers from the battered countries to the north, but still an outsider. As such, I can be visible and invisible at the same time. I stand out, but the Thais never delve too deeply into my business. They would look for a murderer among their own before accusing me. Then there’s the fact that there is no crime without a body. She’ll fit nicely in the polystyrene ice chest now, and off she goes. They’ll never find her. She had no living relatives. Nobody misses a missing person in this country.
Project proposal:
My next will be more carefully thought out. A friendship. An alibi. A glass of red with a fast-dissolving opiate tranquilizer they developed up in the heroin labs across the border. And here she’ll be in this perfect windowless concrete room. No sounds. No escape. The type of room the predictable authors write about where all the serial killers and child abductors take their victims. Where the screams are muffled. And like those predictable authors, I shall let my next victim come around to plead and cry for mercy. Yes, the next one will be better. And the next. And the next.
C.C.
1.
The Lip and Eye Remover
(brand name on bottle of makeup removal cream)
E-MAIL TO CLINT EASTWOOD
Dear Clint,
It’s Jimm here, your Thai friend down on the Gulf of Siam. Merry Christmas to you and your family. It’s been a while since I wrote. I hope you are well. My sister (aka brother) Sissi and I noticed that you recently fired your personal assistant, Liced. We hope it had nothing to do with us hacking into her e-mail account and accessing private information about Malpaso Productions. Liced was a victim in all this and was virtually blackmailed into helping us. I hope you can forgive her and consider rehiring her. As we now have nobody on the inside,
I’m sending this package to your private post office box. I promise this is the last confidential information we will take advantage of. The enclosed DVD contains recorded footage of our very exciting pursuit of Burmese slaves on the Gulf of Thailand. As a live Internet feed, we attracted 1.3 million viewers for the event. Sissi and I are certain every one of them would gladly fork out fifteen dollars a ticket and watch it as a cinematic experience, especially if Natalie Portman played me. But I bow to you on casting decisions on this one. I’ve taken the liberty of wrapping the DVD in my screenplay adaptation of the events.
Clint, I’m sure you’ll recall that this is the fourth screenplay I’ve sent you, each one more thrilling than the last. Although I haven’t heard back from you personally (not complaining. Old age is catching up with all of us), we did intercept a message from one of your editorial reviewers that referred to serious doubts about the quality of characterization in our second manuscript. First, it was heartening to know you bothered to have our work assessed internally. But we feel a need to address this issue, especially as the characters in the second screenplay are my family members. We considered the comments to be unfairly cruel and I would like to take your editor to task.
Our mother, Mair, is perhaps starting to feel the teeth of dementia nibbling at her heels, but that doesn’t make her nutty as a fruitcake
as your reviewer described her. She has long coherent periods which do not involve wearing odd shoes or buying secondhand Cosplay rabbit suits on eBay. (She’s only done that once. She wanted to bond with the dogs.) Between you and me, she was a flower child
for several years and did spend a good deal of time in the jungle with anti-system elements and there may have been intoxicants ingested at that time. But I’d like to see them as turning her into a more whole and mellow human rather than a fruit basket.
The older gentleman who was described as unlikable and two-dimensional
is, in fact, my Grandad Jah. I have to agree with the unlikable
part, but Grandad, I have to strongly protest, is not lacking a dimension. At the very most, he may be short a sense or two. But his absence of humor and social etiquette is more than made up for by his innate skill as an investigator. One would imagine that forty years spent in the Thai Police Force, where the focus is on amassing great wealth rather than putting oneself in harm’s way, might erase a man’s policing instincts. But Grandad Jah has uncanny abilities and is as honest as the day is long (which explains why he’s still penniless).
This brings me to my brother, Arnon, known affectionately as Arny, after his hero Arnold Schwarzenegger. Had we not followed our mother to the northernmost southern province in Thailand for reasons that I’ve only recently come to understand, he would undoubtedly have been this year’s Mr. Chiang Mai Body Beautiful. So, the comment, This character has no personality, no abilities and absolutely no purpose for being in the story,
is a bit like complaining that Moby Dick didn’t have much of a speaking part. Everything revolves around Arny. He’s the sounding board for my stories, and even though he wouldn’t harm a fly, he is my protector. In the last screenplay you’ll notice that he takes on a boatload of pirates all by himself. I may have exaggerated the number of opponents he faced and the injuries he inflicted, but he did make a good account of himself in front of his fiancée.
The Impossible Hermaphrodite Queen,
is my sister,
Sissi, who was neither born with conflicting organs nor crowned. If your reviewer had bothered to read the character sheet, he or she would know this. I feel he or she was just being smart in an attempt to impress you. I’m sure you have a lot of people sucking up to you. Sissi is transgender and has a medical certificate to prove it. With reference to her computer skills, the Malpaso threat to chase you down and run you out of business,
was very dramatic, but I’m sure you realize she’s un-chasable and un-runoutable. Our hacking has, you’ll have to agree, been very friendly, and even though your accounts were wide open to access and abuse, we have not robbed you blind. And I’m sure that when we’re sitting down at the negotiating table discussing the finer details of our first movie deal, we’ll all look back at these days and laugh.
Which brings me to me, Jimm Juree. I should perhaps have been the most offended and hurt by your reviewer’s comments, but I am traditionally a punching bag for abuse. As I am only thirty four and have never been in domestic service, I was forced to look up some other meaning for old maid.
Once found, I am obliged to protest most strongly. I was married and had conjugal moments with my husband during our three-point-seven years of marriage. At least once a month, if I remember rightly. Not a record, I agree, but enough to disqualify me from being a woman who has not formed a human pair bond by the time she is approaching or has reached menopause and the end of her reproductive lifespan.
(Wikipedia.) My husband had been desperate to appear married and I was desperate to be asked, which may not make us a pair bond, but it’s a precedent. I have a good ten years of premenopausal hunting left in me.
I also take objection to the expression a very unlikely Thai female character.
If by this he means I don’t work in a rice paddy or a go-go bar, am not listed on any Internet dating sites, and do not walk with tiny steps or speak demurely when in male company, then, fair enough, he’s got me. But, in fact, we Thai gals were given admittance to the twenty-first century. We’re allowed to chat online and study overseas and speak foreign languages. Would you believe it? We can even run companies and stand for parliament. No, Clint, my hero, I don’t believe for a second that you want movie scripts full of stereotypes, and I’m sure you sent that confidential internal memo to the trash where it belonged.
Well, hey. You probably can’t wait to get your teeth into the enclosed DVD and manuscript, so I’ll stop here. As Sissi and I are sure the North American postal service is all but redundant since the advent of e-mails, we decided to increase the odds of you receiving this package by making thirty-seven copies, which we are sending to your work colleagues, some senior shareholders of the company, friends and family. In each one we have included a small plant pot mat hand-embroidered by Hmong hill-tribe women in the north. As I say, when we’re all raking in the dollars from our first movie collaboration, you’ll stop seeing this as harassment and appreciate the charming side of it. Somewhere on the director’s voice-over on the DVD you’ll mention how annoyed you were at first but that those goddamned crazy Thais had one hell of a product.
Have a great Christmas and may Santa bring you yet another Oscar.
Love, Jimm and Sissi
(Postal address withheld but you have our e-mail)
2.
Please Leave Your Values at the Front Desk
(country hotel)
Ours had become a life of shoulds. My mother, Mair, should have been on duty at the inconvenience store at our family resort. Instead, she was off painting desks at her school for the children of Burmese day laborers. Arny should have been cleaning all the junk off the beach in the unlikely occurrence we’d have any guests, but he was off spotting weights for his fifty-eight-year-old bodybuilding fiancée, Gaew. Grandad Jah should have … well, he didn’t have any role or function in the running of the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant, so he was sitting by the roadside watching traffic, of which there was precious little.
That just left me—who should be just about anywhere else—in charge of five bungalows, four thatched outdoor tables, a half-submerged latrine block, and two cows that had wandered along the beach one day, taken a fancy to our young palms, and stayed. Oh, and there were three dogs that I tend to forget because, despite what they think, I’m not a dog person. They are, in order of rescue, Gogo of the non-functioning intestines; Sticky, second name Rice; and our latest recruit, Little Beer, riddled with mange and unlikely ever to get a date. We used to have a rescue monkey as well, but we sent her to Phuket for trauma rehab. All these were the result of Mair’s dual conditions of early Alzheimer’s and philanthropy. This was a combination which incorporated the search and recover mission for our long-lost father. Look, in fact I do have a story to tell here; a blood-and-guts tale of betrayal, sex, and international intrigue, so don’t let me get sidetracked talking about Captain Kow. But, just briefly, when we first arrived here in the south, Captain Kow was a local celebrity; a gap-toothed, all-knowing, squid-scented old guy with nice eyes. When we found out he was the father who’d deserted us all when I was three, at least one thing made sense. Mair had dragged us down here for a reason. There was method in her madness. We don’t know how she discovered Kow’s whereabouts, but she was single-minded in his pursuit. That, in a Mills and Boone kind of way, I could admire. She gave up all she had, including half her mind, to move her family to the place where her one love had settled. It would have made a good movie but not one I’d want to be in.
Since his unmasking by my transgender sister, Sissi, the good captain had vanished again. We hadn’t had a chance to ask him about our abandonment or the semi-orphanic years we’d spent rattling around in Chiang Mai with humorless Grandad Jah as the nearest thing we had to a father figure. Kow had a lot to answer for, so I could understand his disappearance. I inherited his avoidance of culpability. All right. That’s all I have to say on the subject for now. As a potential award-winning crime reporter in my days at the Chiang Mai Mail, I am only too aware that distracting side-shows can be really annoying for a reader who just wants to get down to the murder. So, here’s the lead-in.
To compensate for the fact we weren’t making any money at all at the resort, I was working two outside jobs. By far the best-paying was my role as an English language doctor. During her brief visit to Maprao, Sissi had introduced me to the dongle, which turned my notebook into a loaded weapon. Suddenly I could be online without queuing for hours at the Pak Nam Internet café. I couldn’t afford to pay the cell-phone bills, but Sissi had done something illegal to the dtac databank that automatically topped me up. I’d spent a lot of my time on the road during my working days up north and was constantly frustrated by the fact that the sign makers assumed they could translate Thai into English merely with the use of a dictionary. This led to sentences such as DO NOT USE ELEVATOR WHILE CAUSING FIRE. So I had the brilliant idea of offering my services to anyone who wanted their signs translated accurately. Sissi blitzed me all over the Internet, and before I knew it, I was getting regular work. Local councils had me writing their signs to avoid embarrassments, such as my favorite detour sign: EVERYONE GETS OFF HERE. Hotels had me improve on warnings like DO NOT DRIVE IN THE POOL AS WATER NOT SO DEEP. Ironically, my English doctoring practice was keeping us all alive. The Chumphon Department of Highways had sent me a list of road signs to correct. I was a whiz at transcription. It was me who convinced the provincial authorities to rewrite their Chum Porn signs. I had struck gold.
My other job
was at the Chumphon News. With the advent of desktop publishing and a wealth of smart unemployed journalism graduates, it was as if almost any town with a population over fifteen boasted its own newspaper. The News operated out of a house beside a busy main road. Its two regular contributors had flu, so, one day the editor asked me if I might interview a famous international writer for them. As famous writers were notoriously thin on the ground in Chumphon, I accepted with bells on. I had visions of Dan Brown on a rock-climbing vacation in Krabi, me flown business class to Bangkok for dinner with Stephen King, a weekend on Kathy Reichs’s yacht off Samui. But I did not have visions of Kor Kao, a ten-minute bicycle ride down the bay from our resort. I was