Bamboo and Blood

Inspector O #3

by James Church

The critically acclaimed A Corpse in the Koryo brought readers into the enigmatic workings of North Korean intelligence with the introduction of a new kind of detective---the mysterious Inspector O. In the follow-up, Hidden Moon, O threaded his way through the minefield of North Korean ministries into a larger conspiracy he was never supposed to touch.

Now the inspector returns . . .

In the winter of 1997, trying to stay alive during a famine that has devastated much of North Korea, Inspector O is ordered to play host to an Israeli agent who appears in Pyongyang. When the wife of a North Korean diplomat in Pakistan dies under suspicious circumstances, O is told to investigate, with a curious Don't look too closely at the details, and stay away from the question of missiles. O knows he can't avoid finding out what he is supposed to ignore on a trail that leads him from the dark, chilly rooms of Pyongyang to an abandoned secret facility deep in the countryside, guarded by a lonely general; and from the streets of New York to a bench beneath a horse chestnut tree on the shores of Lake Geneva, where the Inspector discovers he is up to his ears in missiles---and worse. Stalked by the past and wary of the future, O is convinced there is no one he can trust, and no one he can't suspect. Swiss intelligence wants him out of the country; someone else wants him dead.

Once again, James Church's spare, lyrical prose guides readers through an unfamiliar landscape of whispered words and shadows, a world wrapped in a level of mystery and complexity that few outsiders have experienced. With Inspector O, noir has a new home in North Korea, and James Church holds the keys.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Crime, Detective, Ebooks, Asia, Suspense

304 pages, Paperback

First published November 25, 2008

About the author

James Church is the pseudonym of the author of four detective novels featuring a North Korean policeman, "Inspector O." Church is identified on the back cover of his novels as "a former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia". He grew up in the San Fernando Valley in the United States and was over 60 years old in 2009. His "Inspector O" novels have been well-received, being noted by Asia specialists for offering "an unusually nuanced and detailed portrait" of North Korean society. A Korea Society panel praised the first book in the series for its realism and its ability to convey "the suffocating atmosphere of a totalitarian state". A panelist as well as The Independent's and the Washington Post's reviewers compared the protagonist to Arkady Renko, the Soviet chief inspector in Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park, for providing "a vivid window into a mysterious country".

Reviews

[Tuck · Rating 3 out of 5]

i don't know, james church's novels just keep getting more and more weird and nightmarishly noir. i liked his first one best, "a corpse in the koryo", but then again, all are very compelling. i like his descriptions of the natural environment, people, and buildings better though. which may kind of defeat the point, as its all about what's inside his characters' heads.

[Patrick Sherriff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inspector O has become something of a regular fixture for me these last two months. Since subscribing to Audible, I've listened to the first in the series, A Corpse in the Koryo, and now this, the third (I'd read the second, Hidden Moon a few years back) and while I have to grit my teeth as I listen to the full-throated-all-American narration, which frankly seems a jarring choice of voice actor (since our hero and first person narrator is a North Korean cop), still I look forward to the end of the workday to get my 30 minutes of Inspector O on the iPhone as I stumble home. Church has got his obsession with weather descriptions under control third time round and it's fun to see O get to travel to New York and Geneva, and finally get some action on the love front. You can take O out of North Korea, but you can't take North Korea out of O. Love the character and premise of a good cop in North Korea, but I was hoping for something more than a DPRK cardboard cutout of Sam Spade. But, still, there's something here. Carry on, inspector, I want to find out what's next.

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[Darwin8u · Rating 3 out of 5]

James Church's third Inspector O novel just doesn't quite deliver the goods. It starts out fine, blending Hard-boiled noir (Hammett/Chandler) with international political thriller (le Carré/Steinhauer) all mixed with a bit/dash of Hemingway.

Where Hemingway was fixated on food, wine and women, Church fixates on lack of food, the cold and wood. It all works, if you can ignore the sloppy pacing that creeps into the end of the novel. The novel's first 3/4 seems fine, not exceptional, but interesting and not too overdone, but with about 70 pages left it seems like Church loses all interest in the project and decides it will take entirely too much time and work to weave the various narrative threads back, so he just leaves them, or cuts them off completely.

The end of the novel reminded me of the butchered Geneva plane trees that Inspector O was so upset by. It is hard to love something that hasn't been allowed to freely grow to its potential. As Inspector O says of the plane trees, "They might wish they were dead. No, they have been mangled. Their tops have been hacked off. They are maimed."

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the winter of 1997, people are dying from famine in North Korea. Inspector O is ordered to investigate, but not solve, the death of a diplomat's wife in a Pakistan. His job is to compile lists and put them in a folder and forget about them, and to stay away from anything to do with missiles.

He is helped/hindered/followed by an assortment of oddities - Sohn, a senior official from another security agency, Jeno, the Mossad agent from Switzerland, M. Beret, the head of Swiss counterintelligence. There are two people who may or may not be trying to kill him - his estranged brother, and the three fingered man who was supposed to have died in an earlier unsuccessful mission with O but did not.

He is sent to New York

"where I could expect orders that would tell me less than what Pak had already told me informally. The orders would be encoded, but try as the code clerk could, he would not be able to make them sensible because, at base, they would be meaningless, almost certainly designed to use what I already knew to lead me away from what I really needed to learn. Whatever I was supposed to discover in New York, I wasn't supposed to understand how it fit into a larger picture."

In other words, it's typical of the assignments that O is given. But this one takes him to New York and to Geneva where he is to play an unspecified non-role in a delegation discussing - what else - missiles.

The setting and the characters of this series are wonderfully done. They give a vivid sense of the strangeness of that closed society, the Kafkaesque bureaucracy and O's constant struggle to maintain his integrity and to make some sense - at least to and for himself.

[Jane · Rating 1 out of 5]

While at times very clever, its convoluted, vague and overcomplicated plot put me to sleep every time I tried to read it! The olpt seemed almost pointless.

[Ludditus · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a reason this book starts with a rather unusual note: “Many of the events mentioned in this story actually happened, though not necessarily at the time, in the sequence, or exactly in the way they swirl around Inspector O. For that reason, and many others, this book is a work of fiction.” If the first two novels in the series are not precisely situated in time—they could have happened in 2006-2007, but as well in 2016-2017—this third one has the unfortunate choice of taking place “In the dreary, dangerous winter of 1997” (and 1998).

Therefore, much as one might enjoy the opportunity to encounter Chief Inspector Pak, the times are incredibly harsh and desperate. But let’s not anticipate as of yet and say hello to Pak: «He fiddled with the snaps on his chin strap. “I don’t like snaps, did you know that? Never have. Too damned difficult to undo in the cold, especially when you’re wearing these damned gloves. If you have to take off your gloves to work the snaps, what have you gained? Who invents these things? Does anybody think anymore? Does your scarf itch? Mine is driving me crazy. Do something with these lenses, would you?”»

Let’s just say that, if today or ten years ago life was absurd yet bearable in DPRK, something impossible to explain made that after the death of Kim Il-sung, the entire country be subjected to the biggest famine ever known—except maybe for the Holodomor. What you see today in Venezuela is a child’s play. Except that back then the West really used to send lots and lots of rice to DPRK—with modest effects though.

Random quotations from the novel supporting this historical reality:
— This was a bad conversation to be having. The weather was bad. News from the countryside was bad. I tried to lighten the mood. “I heard somewhere that eating tree bark is healthy for the gums.”
— Pak motioned for me to sit down, but I didn’t want to. If I sat, we’d start talking about things we shouldn’t be discussing. Inevitably, the subject of how bad things were in the countryside would come up, people moving without permits to find food, bodies on the side of the road, trains with old women riding on the roofs of the railway cars and falling off. We’d talk, one thing would lead to another, and we’d both be depressed for the rest of the day.
— He. Him. With a slight lifting of the eyebrows, say “him”—no one had any doubt that you meant the new leader, still mourning his father as the rest of us drifted. We all knew that we were drifting, and we knew where. A nation of shriveled leaves floating on a doomed river toward the falls. A winter of endless sorrow.
— Each night he fell asleep while he posted the signs on the four corners of the darkness, “Tomorrow is canceled, please, no more. No more.” But dawn ignored the pleas, dawn brought nothing, no hope, no light, nothing but a selfish insistence that it would inflict itself, empty-handed, the burden of new hours grinding down even the strongest until they imagined death itself had abandoned them, taking friends and family but leaving them.
— I lived alone, but loneliness was no burden, not like people sometimes imagined. It was a matter of indifference to me if a new day came. Dawn brought nothing, but I didn’t care. If the new light of day had ever meant anything, I had forgotten what it was.
— No, he wouldn’t leave. He wouldn’t leave, though there were people we both knew who had done that, leaving family, leaving everything, walking into the cold and disappearing. A query would come down from the Ministry once a month—“Where is so-and-so? Anyone with information about so-and-so should report immediately to the chief of personnel,” which was almost funny because the chief of personnel had disappeared. Someone had been assigned his job but not given the title lest that person disappear, too, and the job have to be filled again.
— Sick. That meant he was dying of hunger, but no one would say that, certainly not this kid who was starting to wonder what I was doing, regretting he’d come out to meet me, still weighing what he said to make sure he didn’t say too much.
— There are new instructions from the Center for everyone working overseas. They can be summarized as follows: Collect vegetable seeds and food, food, food. Fertilizer if it is to be had, but the first priority is food. So is the second priority. And so is the third. On ships, on trucks, on bicycles—it doesn’t make any difference. For the moment, we grovel, we pander, we lick the boots of anyone who will deliver.

It wasn’t just food. Nothing worked; power outages were common in Cuba in the “Período especial” and in Romania in the 1980s, but nothing like in North Korea. Grin and bear it: «The lights flickered once, then went out. So did the heater. “Funny,” he said, “the other day on the radio they announced that the electricity workers had overfulfilled this month’s quota.” —“Perhaps they were rewarded with today off.”»

Also: «That meant he had seen the city in better days, in the 1970s, when the streetcars ran and the lights worked.»

I won’t comment on the actual spy story—you must know by now that Inspector O is not just about police work in the most absurd country on Planet Earth. I’d only say that it’s even more convoluted than the previous ones, and some readers might have certain disappointments.

I myself started to get annoyed by Inspector O’s wood mania. I can accept “the only North Korean alive who imagines he is Spinoza” and everything that’s even remotely philosophical, poetic, or showing love for nature, but up to a point. Wood and Gramdfather: «When I asked what he was going to make out of the boards, he looked surprised. “How would I know? The wood and I have to decide together, don’t we? Don’t think you can just impose your will on things. Don’t listen to this talk you’re hearing these days about man being at the center of creation. Wood doesn’t know about politics. And thank goodness for that.” It turned out that the beech wanted to be part of a chair.» The heck it wanted.

Funny thing, here to the author couldn’t help but insert a reference to Romania, for no reason whatsoever. Think this is Geneva: «“Because if you do have one of those Asian bugs, we’ll have to clean everything in your room, and for that we’ll have to pay the maid extra. She’s Romanian, and she knows the law. It could be quite a bother.” ... “It’s not my land. I am from Romania, and I was only checking to make sure you’re not sick again. They don’t want some strange epidemic coming out of this hotel. There are all sorts of health people in this city; they can be very strict sometimes. Believe me, I know.”»

Next stop, volume four in the series.

[Alejandrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not so much a mystery in the tradional sense, but more of a spy story written in a style reminsescent of John Le Carre without Smiley and the Soviets. Instead you have North Korea during the great famine of the 1990s (read up on that disaster!), missile sales in the background and Kafkaesque depictions of NK society, as it likely is in reality. Everything is purposefully vague with huge doses of sarcasm in the dialogue and the occasional burst of humor. VERY well written. I found it hard to put down and I'm on my way to the 4th novel in the series.

[Mal Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

James Church’s Bamboo and Blood is one of the most unusual detective novels you’ll ever come across. Opening in a frigid North Korean winter in 1997, the story revolves around the hapless Inspector O and his unhappy boss, Chief Inspector Pak of the Ministry of Public Security, described in the novel as the police. Kim Jong-Il stepped into his father’s shoes as dictator upon the old man’s death only three years earlier, and the Communist Party and the Army are still vying for ascendancy in the power dynamics of the North Korean state. Meanwhile, the most brutal famine in the country’s history is underway: “classes were held only sporadically, with so many teachers too weak or tired to lecture, and the students too hungry to concentrate. . . Pyongyang was awash in rumors, most of them true, about how conditions in the countryside had fallen apart. We were ripe for something, I just didn’t know what.”

An investigation rife with uncertainty and confusion

Like the two novels that preceded it in the Inspector O series, the dominant theme in Bamboo and Blood is ambiguity. Characters, roles, circumstances — everything is awash in confusion and uncertainty. When Inspector O is assigned to investigate the circumstances of a young woman’s murder — in Pakistan? the U.S.? somewhere else: it’s unclear — he discovers that her personnel file has disappeared. He picks up hints of her life from a friend at the university and from the woman’s father, a retired air force general. But there’s no proof that she was murdered, much less where the alleged event took place.

Meanwhile, Inspector O’s investigation is interrupted when he receives unwanted orders to meet a foreigner at the airport and escort him around Pyongyang for the duration his stay. The foreigner may be Swiss or Hungarian, he may be Jewish, even possibly Israeli. The murder investigation is sidetracked as Inspector O’s life comes to be dominated by the unpredictable actions of the foreigner.

When a high-ranking Party official orders him to fly to Geneva to observe North Korea’s negotiations with the United States, probably having something to do with missiles, it’s a certainty that the foreigner will turn up again. And even though this appears to be clear, there are other surprises in store, as two mysterious individuals from O’s past turn up in the course of his work. Unlike its two predecessors in the series, Bamboo and Blood goes overboard on the confusion and uncertainty. The novel would be more rewarding to read if at least a few things were much clearer.

The great North Korean famine

It is historical fact that Kim Jong Il, father of North Korea’s current dictator, Kim Jong-Un, was named Leader in 1994. (He remained in the post until his death in 2011.) The economic crisis that began in the final years of the dictatorship headed by their father and grandfather, Kim Il-Sung, lasted for the four-year period 1994-98. In its wake came a severe and widespread famine that killed an enormous number of North Korean citizens, estimated at anywhere from 240,000 to 3,500,000. (The country’s population was then around just 22 million.) Wikipedia describes the causes of the famine as follows: “Economic mismanagement and the loss of Soviet support caused food production and imports to decline rapidly. A series of floods and droughts exacerbated the crisis. The North Korean government and its centrally-planned system proved too inflexible to effectively curtail the disaster.”

About the author

James Church is the pen name of a man described as “a former Western intelligence officer” with intimate knowledge of Asia. Asian specialists who have read any of the five novels in the Inspector O series have praised the nuanced pictured he paints of life under the North Korean dictatorship.

[Rowena Hoseason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Idiosyncratic, offbeat and intriguing, the Inspector O series wraps a murder-mystery in political intrigue with a captivating central character at its core.
This is the third novel in the Inspector O series. New readers are advised to start with ‘A Corpse in the Koryo’ rather than trying to get to grips with O’s character and his particularly peculiar situation all at once. The earlier books have been rather more traditional whodunnits, set in communist North Korea with O as an eccentric detective who solves mysteries, even when they slither into the perilous territory of state security.

In ‘Bamboo and Blood’, author James Church shifts the focus of the story away from ‘interesting international detective’ and deep into the territory of espionage and tradecraft. There is a murder to investigate and a mystery to solve, but these are the incidental interludes in the plot. ‘Bamboo and Blood’ is a Cold War spy story, and the political position of North Korea in the late 1990s has ceased to be the backdrop to the action: the political position of North Korea IS the story.

There's detailed info about the plot and characterisation here:
http://murdermayhemandmore.wordpress....

Author James Church has certainly succeeded in creating a fictionalised representation of a bewildering political situation, where no one is quite sure what or who they’re working for, or which outcome is preferable. Church is a master at writing dialogue at cross-purposes, where both parties could be having a conversation across slightly different dimensions. The result is sometimes bitingly comic, and sometimes bitterly sad. It’s also as confusing as can be; we only know as much as O does and half the time we don’t know the half of what O understands or experiences. So the narrative feels fragmented and unpredictable; light on description and long on dialogue. A lot like real life, in fact.

So ‘Bamboo and Blood’ works on many levels, some more successful than others. James Church has distilled his own experience as a diplomat in the far east into fiction, and his portrayal of North Korean society and its political system is fascinating. The character of Inspector O is a splendid creation, quietly quirky but solid and dependable. Church portrays the spiralling weirdness of low level espionage with witty disdain, so O is rubbish at tradecraft, yet spends much of this novel catching trains where he doesn’t meet people, decoding messages at dead letter drops, and so on.

Yet it’s hard to finish this novel and feel completely satisfied. I was pretty certain that some significant events had sneaked past me, and that I hadn’t quite understood all the plot lines. It’s also hard to categorise ‘Bamboo and Blood’. It’s not a detective story, but it’s not a modern espionage thriller, either. There’s very little running, shouting, car chasing or gunplay. Jason Bourne would be completely out of place; Alec Leamas would be right at home.

‘Bamboo and Blood’ harks back to the heyday of the cold war spy story, when Le Carre wrote sparse but brilliant novels, and where the important moments of the story were never spelled out but subtly implied. So give yourself time to read and digest this story; it’s not a by-the-numbers mystery where you can count up the clues and come up with the killer.

8/10

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a mildly frustrating book. It is so well written, I like O's character so much, and it does such an excellent if low-key job of showing what life must be like in North Korea, (this time, set during the great famine of 1997, making the book even more depressing and cynical than A Corpse in the Koryo).

But at the same time, I have to agree with many of the other reviews of both this book and Koryo. Most of the characters in both books speak with the same clever/ironic/cynical voice, so that it can be hard to identify who is speaking just by reading what they say. More importantly, both books have very complicated plots, neither of which (to my simple mind, at least) are neatly wrapped up by the final pages. Although I'll give Church the benefit of the doubt here; if he is in fact a former intelligence officer "with decades of experience in the Far East," then maybe he understands better than us lesser mortals that perhaps there are no neat solutions in his world, and that a case can be "closed" with as many unanswered questions as there were when it was first opened.

With his foreign trips, participation in hopeless delegations, and interactions with a gallery of enigmatic yet colorful characters (both Eastern and Western), it's easy to compare Inspector O to Pak Jun Do in the excellent The Orphan Master's Son. It's also a little unfair, since Bamboo and Blood was written before Orphan. That said, however, Bamboo still suffers by comparison - it's a really good book, but whatever impact it could have had has been eclipsed by the so-much-better Orphan. There is already a third book in the series which I don't have any real interest in at this point. However, I would be interested to read any subsequent books dealing with the current Kim Jung Un era, as I'm sure an author with Church's obvious skills and expertise could do a fascinating job skewering the "new" North Korea - hopefully with Dennis Rodman as a central character!

[Trish · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Church's series of North Korean Police Detective Inspector O is something of an anomoly in the world of detective fiction. Here we have a keen-eyed detective whose field of expertise is not so much citizen-on-citizen violence as government-on-citizen violence. While Inspector O is a patriot of uncommon fidelity, the angle from which we view his mind working is not so much internal as external. We, as facilitated by the author Church, are watching Inspector O make decisions and we are making an analysis. We are foreign agents--we are being taught to be foreign agents--in this series written by a foreign agent. We are being shown what to look for, and this is latest edition, we are even being taught tradecraft. Wacky tradecraft, but there you have it.

I like Inspector O very much. The author has a depth of compassion for him and his close compatriots that helps us to give them some depth of character and a degree of humanity. We know so little about North Korea, every bit of description helps us "to put flesh on the bones", so to speak. And if even a portion of the descripton given us here is true, North Korea and its people are in a world of hurt.

I especially liked this third book in the series because Inspector O was given his head and allowed to travel overseas. He was quite witty when describing Geneva and New York, the "talks" going on there, and the spymasters he encountered. Much of the best parts of this book consisted of conversation rather than description, so Church is taking a unique jog in the business of series writing and engaging the reader in a way different from others writing detective series. Approach this with an open mind, and I believe you will be amused, but will also have plenty of food for thought.

[Jessica - How Jessica Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in North Korea in 1997, this book tells the story of Inspector O, a thoughtful and introverted man, trying to maneuver his way through the complicated politics and silences of the North Korean Ministry. The bleak winter reflects the bleak attitude of most of the people in North Korea, who are struggling merely to stay alive while O struggles to discover who killed a woman, when he doesn't even know where or how she died.

His mysterious assignment to discover who killed the unknown woman leads him to New York and Geneva. I feel like the plot gets a bit too convoluted in Geneva, where O's fellow North Koreans diplomats and the Israeli who has been following him are joined by Swiss intelligence, and then the three groups proceed to chase each other in circles while they all try to figure out what O is up to, and he tries to figure out what they're up to.

The glimpse of the poverty and hardship of life in North Korea was gripping though, as was the stark imagery of the winter in Korea and Switzerland. O's obsession with wood, and the feelings that different types of trees can create in him are a part of his thoughtfulness and his careful attention to detail. This attention to detail is reflected both in O's knowledge of what makes a beech different from a maple, and in the way he can see himself in the shoes of those around him, whether they be fellow Koreans, or foreigners.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Church's Inspector O is one of the most interesting characters in literature today. A police inspector in North Korea, this story follows O's earlier career and is set in 1997 against the backdrop of the famine that was hitting North Korea at the time. He is assigned to investigate the death of a North Korean diplomat's wife, but it's made clear he shouldn't get TOO close to finding out what happened. He ends up being assigned to keep an eye on an Israeli who is interested in the DPRK's nuclear arms program while in Korea, going to New York, then to Geneva, and becoming involved in the nuclear talks then taking place.

Church is a great author and his prose have much to recommend them. While commonly referred to as "sparse" Church's prose engage the reader and communicate as much by suggestion as what is actually explicitly written. They do, in some sense, remind me of Jack Vance's. The word choice is much less obscure, but the overall style is similar.

Church's background in intelligence allows him to make the setting of his stories believable and his characters sympathetic while not making them carbon copies of Americans with Korean names. (North Korea is notoriously closed off from the rest of the world so this is no mean feat.)

If there's a mystery series that deserves to be made into movies this is it.

[Spuddie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another interesting mystery set in North Korea in the capital city of Pyongyang. Inspector O works for the Ministry of Public Security and in this book the entire country is grinding to a halt due to a widespread famine leaving even those who are working with empty bellies much of the time. Procedures and processes in NK are so foreign that they could well take place on Mars, and this story gets extremely confusing at times as O must deal with intrigue and espionage, the death of a diplomat's wife, and is eventually sent to Geneva to participate in talks regarding missiles--although he's told he's not really supposed to 'do' anything. It would be hard for him to get up to much, since he's being watched by three or four different groups, each assuming he knows more than he does.

I have come to really like this odd, solitary character and I much appreciate the immersion into the culture, which is as I mentioned, more foreign than foreign. This one gets a bit draggy in spots and confusing with all the various spy vs. spy groups, but it gets there in the end and I shall look forward to the next in series.

[Seonaid · Rating 4 out of 5]

North Korea, winter 1997, and people are dying from famine. There is not enough electricity to heat the offices, little fuel for the cars and an over-riding feeling of despair. Inspector O is ordered to investigate, but not solve, the death of a diplomat's wife in Pakistan. His job is to compile lists, put them in a folder and forget about them. And then he is sent to Geneva.

It's an odd novel – a little bit Noir (the scenes in Geneva read with The Third Man theme playing in my head) and I never really got fully to grips with why O was really there – was it missiles? Was it food? O certainly never found out either – and yet it is a strangely compelling read. I like O, and his supervisor, Pak. I love the insights into life in North Korea, and I like how Church does not fall into easy stereotypes. O is frustrated by a lack of police resources, but despite being given the chance to defect, he has no desire to leave his country.

‘Bamboo and Blood’ is a Cold War spy story with overtones of Kafka, sometimes funny, sometimes bitterly sad, often confusing and always quietly compassionate. If you've never read Inspector O before, I recommend you start with 'A Corpse in the Koryo.'

[Annabelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very unique setting, a police Inspector in Pyongyang, North Korea. All the reviews of this book took about Church’s sparse prose. I am not sure it is sparse but maybe obscure. There are a lots of comings and goings and Inspector O is in the middle, escorting an Israeli with lots of cash to run down munitions sites, traveling to New York and Geneva to give metaphoric messages to unspecified people. Turkish émigrés punch people. A man from Inspector O’s past who was blown up in a botched mission, but now reappears with only two fingers on one hand, or is it three. The book does not flow, he has quotations within long paragraphs about thoughts. But it is oddly compelling, and has some humor, nonrational eccentricities and existentialism. Church draws the hunger and travails of life in North Korea well, as he does with the machinations of the communist system, where one tries to know nothing, but moves in the shadows to work the system. Church is a former intelligence officer, and I wonder if this is his way of acting out against the absurdity of spying.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my second James Church book. I cannot remember where I found out about him, but no matter, he is a fascinating writer. His characters, despite their total foreignness to most of us, are formed as rapidly as those of Graham Green and are treated just as sympathetically. Though his view of life in North Korea is said to reflect his own deep knowledge, in a sad sort of way it coincides with that generally held in the West about that unfortunate country. nevertheless, he paints a wonderful picture of life in a paranoid society (George Orwell would have approved) and though they are ostensibly police novels they do spread themselves widely and are amazingly convoluted. It is necessary to adopt a paranoid view to imagine what their lives are like. Dance of the Seven Veils, Russian Dolls, mirror worlds, layered cakes, it is all here. I hope this may encourage those not familiar with his work to try it.

[B. Factor · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the novel where James Church betrayed Inspector O for the promise of a movie contract. The Inspector O of A Corpse in the Koryo was an incorruptible North Korean patriot who understood but did not endorse the failings of his leadership. He could not have been tempted by Western flesh. In Bamboo and Blood, he sleeps with the daughter of an Israeli spy on an important diplomatic trip to Geneva. Now you may be wondering what a low-level police inspector would be doing on an important diplomatic trip to Geneva.... It appears that James Church has run out of ideas for Inspector O and has resorted to using NYT clippings to design his plots.

[Jimmun · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well written book which gives insight into life in North Korea. The book is written in the first person and has very good dialogue--some very funny sarcasm from a cynical cop. Rather than a police procedural, it is closer to an espionage novel dealing with the internal and external complexities of North Korea's missile trade.
The author is retired from the US Intelligence community where North Korea must have been his focus. He writes with a comfortable confidence which adds to the pleasure of reading the book. The author presents a North Korea that is very complicated rather than as a one dimensional cartoon.

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Bamboo and Blood" is the first Inspector O novel that I've read even though it is the third in the series. Each book seems pretty self-contained as long as you don't mind jumping around the Inspector O time-line when reading out of order.

Please don't judge this book by the title. This is not some dime-a-dozen murder mystery. James Church creates a film noir inspired world set in North Korea. It is a detective's tail guided by North Korean bureaucracy, corruption, ideology, and undertones of foreign policy. It is witty, suspenseful, and always engaging.

[Vikas Datta · Rating 5 out of 5]

An intriguing look into a super secretive and paranoid but hugely deprived society and high-level hijinks where no one, whom our battered protagonist meets, are what they seem to be - that Swiss counter-intelligence chief is a marvellous character.... Starts slowly but builds up to high-octane action. Look forward to reading others in the series...

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is just a difficult book to follow. I prefer more plot, less meandering. I really wanted to like it, but in the end I think a 3 rating is generous.

[Syrdarya · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved the first book in the series, and liked the second one, but I really struggled with this book. It took me forever to read and was vague to the point of me becoming frustrated.

The book takes place during a famine, probably the one in the late 90s, although it doesn't seem like the earlier books took place during that same era. Inspector O is assigned to gather as much info as he can about a North Korean woman who died, possibly in Pakistan. He's sent off to China, and then to New York, although we the readers hear about the New York trip in a vague manner after the fact. He's assigned repeatedly to escort a man named Jenö around Pyongyang. This guy keeps wanting to see restricted areas and O is told not to take him and then told in a roundabout way to take him and strings are pulled and it has something to do with missiles, etc. The guy claims to be Hungarian, and maybe he is, but he's an Israeli spy.

O is sent off to Switzerland to sit in on nuclear talks and he doesn't know what he's doing and he's bored and he meets lots of spies. There are Turkish spies working for Israel. There are different groups of North Koreans, one group including his brother, who are pitted against each other. For someone coming from a country where he must have been going hungry, O declines food rather often in Switzerland. The Romanians at the hotel are rather hostile to him. He has a love affair but the reader is sort of dropped into it. He has a crush, she seems attracted, he's off doing something completely different and then BAM! he's getting out of bed with the woman. That sort of vagueness is part of what bothered me about the book.

Most people aren't given names, and they claim to have certain nationalities but they're often lying. A couple people suddenly had names dropped onto them almost at the end of the book, by which time I was so confused I couldn't even remember where O had met them in the first place. Many of the people make vague comments to one another, or sly comments, or veiled comments, and most of the time I felt like I was missing the context behind what they said as well as what they expected O to take away from what they said.

It all felt like a cubist rendition of a noir novel, and I did not enjoy it.

[Seth Isenberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another thrilling Kafka-esque detective novel. The background of the macro events in North Korea have a strong affect on the story this time around. I enjoyed the international flavor of this one, but the surrounding characters towards the last third of the book lead the story into farcical territory. While it was still enjoyable, I felt it to be a bit off tonally from the rest of the book and the two that preceded it. When in North Korea, it makes sense that motives and intent are constantly obscured or evaded. That setting and the accompanying reality set an almost natural bizarre atmosphere. Once outside those borders, it seems like Church is twisting the plot into knots to make things just as opaque, with every character coming in and out of contact as if they are waiting in the wings of the stage. I'm hoping next time Church manages to get back to what made the first two books so compelling without needing to resort to stretching credulity to do it.

[Bonniecco cco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enigmatic in the blurb for this book fits. It's 3rd in a series, but the only one I have read so far. I feel like I have a small sense of what it is like to be in a situation of national deprivation and one where it's dangerous to complain. For example, I liked the small details about the cold. The narrative has large gaps which the reader fills in with speculation. Generally books without female characters of any importance do not draw me in, but this was an exception. I'm going to request books one and two from the library now. North Korea is hard to understand, and I surely do not know if Church portrays the atmosphere correctly but I hope he does. I enjoyed this book for its odd mysterious plot. People keep popping up, surprising O, but not disturbing his balance.

[Becky · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this third story in the Inspector O series I found myself interested only in the famine of the mid 1990s in North Korea. I found myself with the help of a friend looking up and reading articles about what happened in North Korea upon the ascendancy of Kim Jung Il. The 1990s were terrible times for the people of North Korea. Inspector O becomes involved in some sort of spy activity and the plot of the story was difficult to figure out. I am not sure that I will continue with this series.

[Gary Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Third in a series, an Inspector O novel. Inspector O is a North Korean Policeman. He seems to be continually dragged into affairs of state, requiring him to travel out of North Korea. Written by "James Church" who was supposedly a Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia. The plot is complex with the pieces never coming together until the final half dozen pages. The author has been mentioned as an Asian, John le Carré, which might not be too far from the mark.

[D K · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe 2.5 stars.

The prose was more florid, the plot more convoluted, the conversations more frustratingly oblique, and the herrings 1000% redder.

There were some worthwhile parts, some poetic passages, a few new glimpses into North Korea during the famine, but overall, nowhere near as good as "A corpse in the Koryo".

[Caroline Weber · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this - but I don't understand it. I would need to read and learn a LOT more about North Korea, missiles, and the relationships with Pakistan, Israel, the USA and Switzerland. I asked friends some questions, I surfed the web a bit, and I learned a bit, but most of this went right by me.

Love the characters, love the exposition of the context.

[Dale · Rating 3 out of 5]

3rd in a series of 4 (so far) Inspector O N. Korean novels; this one involves travels to US and Switzerland; more intriguing, more humor, still too wordy. I kept at it but it was not one I easily picked up at night…, still I also didn’t put it down. Hardback, purchased via Half.com,