A Corpse in the Koryo

Inspector O #1

by James Church

Against the backdrop of a totalitarian North Korea, one man unwillingly uncovers the truth behind series of murders, and wagers his life in the process.Sit on a quiet hillside at dawn among the wildflowers; take a picture of a car coming up a deserted highway from the south. Simple orders for Inspector O, until he realizes they have led him far, far off his department's turf and into a maelstrom of betrayal and death. North Korea's leaders are desperate to hunt down and eliminate anyone who knows too much about a series of decades-old kidnappings and murders---and Inspector O discovers too late he has been sent into the chaos.This is a world where nothing works as it should, where the crimes of the past haunt the present, and where even the shadows are real. A corpse in Pyongyang's main hotel---the Koryo---pulls Inspector O into a confrontation of bad choices between the devils he knows and those he doesn't want to meet. A blue button on the floor of a hotel closet, an ice blue Finnish lake, and desperate efforts by the North Korean leadership set Inspector O on a journey to the edge of a reality he almost can't survive. Like Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy and the Inspector Arkady Renko novels, A Corpse in the Koryo introduces another unfamiliar world, a perplexing universe seemingly so alien that the rules are an enigma to the reader and even, sometimes, to Inspector O. Author James Church weaves a story with beautifully spare prose and layered descriptions of a country and a people he knows by heart after decades as an intelligence officer. This is a chilling portrayal that, in the end, leaves us wondering if what at first seemed unknowable may simply be too familiar for comfort.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Crime, Asia, Mystery Thriller, Thriller, Audiobook

292 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2006

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

[Kemper · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read it quick before North Korea decides you can't!

Kim Jong-il wasn’t just another fascist dictator whose only hobby was firing cruise missile over Japan when he got bored. He was also reportedly an incredible golfer. According to the state newspaper, the first time he ever played, Kim finished 18 holes in just 34 shots. Which would be 25 shots lower than the best official round ever played and would mean that he hit multiple holes-in-one in a single round.

With the whole country so completely locked down, it’s hard for us to know how the people of North Korea really feel about their leaders. We tend to think of them as this oppressed but possibly brainwashed sea of humanity that lives in a combination of fear and awe of Kim Jong-il. But people are people, and surely there were some in North Korea who read that their Dear Leader shot the lowest round of golf in history, rolled their eyes and thought, “Just how stupid does that asshat think we are?”

Inspector O is kind of like that. He routinely ‘forgets’ to wear his pin with Kim’s picture on it that everyone is required to wear, and he shows a surprising amount of rebellious spirit when having to navigate the treacherous bureaucratic waters of running criminal investigations in a police state. O is given a mysterious assignment to go outside Pyongyang and take a picture of a car that is supposed to drive by at a certain time. O isn’t happy about being sent on this errand, and since nothing works in North Korea, the camera he was given has a dead battery so he isn’t able to take the picture.

This draws O and his boss Pak into a dangerous games where they’re being used as pawns between two powerful rivals, Kim from the Military Security forces and Kang from the Investigations Department. Despite their efforts to say out of the fight, O has to follow Kang’s orders to a dangerous town on the Chinese border and then into investigating the murder of a foreigner at the Koryo hotel.

The obvious comparison to this series is Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko series that started in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Like Renko, O is a decent man who has no illusions about the government he serves, but he also isn’t stupid enough to try and change it. Just trying to do a little honest police work is dangerous enough.

James Church is supposedly the pseudonym of a former Western intelligence agent. The details of everyday life in North Korea ring true, and O is a fascinating character. The writing is also very good, but the plot is pretty confusing. O spends a great deal of the book just blindly being sent to different places, and neither he nor the reader knows why until very late in he book. Plus, there’s a large plot point regarding O’s hated brother abruptly dropped into the middle of the book with no history or explanation. Maybe the later books in the series get into that more, but it seemed kind of random though.

Still, this was a well written thriller with an interesting main character in a setting that most of us outside of North Korea will never know.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was one of those books that starts out as a mystery and finishes...well, pretty much the same - still a mystery. Part police story and part 007 spy drama, you never quite know what exactly is going on. The protagonist, Inspector O, (at least I can spell his name)is ordered about from pillar to post on a series of investigative odd jobs. He seems as mystified as the reader regarding the deaths and corruption encountered during the course of his investigative meanderings.

I'll be the first to admit that I know sweet diddly about North Korea, but I doubt that police and security agencies there gun each other down in the streets and office buildings on a regular basis. Maybe that's what the author was counting on...that the reading public would be so ignorant of the country that he could make any old thing believable. It seemed odd to me; I understand inter-departmental rivalries, but this seemed to go too far.

Mr Church didn't make Inspector O work for me; he is portrayed as a thoughtful and sensitive man trying to function in a brutal and oppressive regime, but seems oddly detached when people close to him are bumped off along the way. Maybe that's what Church was going for, but it didn't work for me. I didn't believe the character and found the convoluted story line hard to follow. In fact, having read the book, I'm still not sure what the heck happened there.

This book has some redeeming qualities. Church is a capable writer and has created some good descriptive passages and entertaining verbal exchanges, of which I will include a small sampling:

(p.72) - Listening is the anvil that forms the sword, the fire that
melts the lead for the bullet. Listening is the time to
recoup, to gather your wits, to plan your attack. If you
listen to anyone carefully enough, you'll hear the slip
that points to their vitals. It's the compass on the
killing map. People talk, but no one wants to say
anything because someone might listen."

Or this exchange between O and an Irish operative named Richie:

(Ppg 107-108)
"Kang is an interesting character"

"I thought so. Very complicated man. The sun bounced off
him in a thousand directions. Like a diamond. Built up
quite a list of enemies, as far as I could tell."

"Nice image, Kang as a diamond. How many karats would you
say?"

"A diamond in a garbage pile, who cares what it might have
fetched on the world market."

The Irishman clicked his pen.

Finally, a brief excerpt of a passage in which O is describing the Alps (he has a thing for mountains):

The peaks I saw clawed the sky, so that the dawn was
wounded and the sunlight bled into the day.

In fact, the writing was just good enough to overcome a confusing story line and a protagonist who doesn't seem to be fully developed. I liked it just enough to give the next Inspector O book a try sometime just to see if a different setting changes my opinion.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of my coworkers is married to an editor for St. Martin's, and he came to a company party one time with a bunch of free books. Among the stack, I saw A Corpse in the Koryo and the title made me give it a second glance. The fact that it was set in North Korea sold me -- my sisters are adopted from South Korea, and I've had some interest in both countries for some time now.

The book's pacing is not particularly speedy, but it doesn't ever get bogged down either. The plot ticks away as more characters are introduced, more information revealed, and more twists occur. It's sometimes hard to keep track of, but as the mystery wraps up at the end, you feel like everything made sense.

I liked the main character, Inspector O - I enjoyed his cynicism and straightforwardness, along with his lack of interest in toeing the party line. He has a dry sense of humor and an interesting outlook on life informed by both his culture and his personal experience.

I enjoyed the book, but found myself wishing at times that it would delve more deeply into the world of North Korea. It gives little glimpses of things like the difficulties in acquiring basic supplies, and the unreliability of train service, but there is not a lot of detail given on Korean culture or day to day life. Then again, perhaps a crime novel is not the right place for such.

I would recommend the book to those who enjoy realistic fiction, military thrillers, and mystery novels. It's not normally the type of book I choose to read, but I enjoyed it.

[Lisa Sansone]

I agree with the general sentiments of most of the reviews on here.

I liked a lot of things about the book. I thought the character of Inspector O was interesting and engaging, and I was particularly moved by his relationship with both his grandfather and with his boss, Pak. In many ways, I liked the atmosphere set by the author, and really appreciated his attention to the small detail, as well as his evocative descriptions of people and places.

That said, I'm not entirely sure that the actual plot, itself, ultimately resonated for me on any kind of a deep or overly satisfying level. I don't know how much of this is due to my unfamiliarity with the North Korean culture (i.e., perhaps those more familiar with that culture might understand or get more out of the (sparsely explained) story and its resolution). At the end of the day, I'm still not 100% sure I understood what happened (or why), and the explanations given at the very end by Kang didn't really help to clarify or illuminate or emotionally resolve things for me, either. While I liked the sparseness of the prose, I also got confused by Military Security, Intelligence, Police, etc.

However, I do think that this writer is enormously talented, in many ways, and I am interested in reading other books in this series.

(One other random thought -- I'm not sure I like the title of the book! The Corpse in the Koryo isn't introduced until about 1/2 through the book, and has virtually nothing to do with the main themes of the story).

[J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are quite a few reasons that this shouldn't be a winner, not least that the plotlines equivocate and cross themselves, while the reader is left with twelve shaggy-dog threads to tie together in the end. That is, if the reader is only interested in making some kind of logical structure out of the plot.

But there are two main things working in favor of A Corpse In The Koryo, the simplest of which is that Mr Church happens to be a former intelligence officer with 'decades of experience in East Asia' who is using a pseudonym for the book; the endflaps assure us that he knows whereof he speaks, and necessarily has to obscure his real identity. (Which is somehow way more reassuring for a suspense novel than would be, say, a recent graduate degree from an Ivy, for example...)

The more difficult advantage being pressed here is the sense of place and mood-- while the plotlines fluctuate all over the map, the emotional tenor and atmosphere work as one to convey the story, which doesn't really rely on what happens.

So the reverse of the Le Carré paradigm, where the grimness of mood & setting exactly parallels the tight clockwork of the plotting. More in the way of Borges, or Conrad maybe, the sleepwalkingly noirish sensibility is jarringly contrasted with the harsh day-to-day, and the result is engrossing.

This isn't for everyone, kind of in the way that some of Kazuo Ishiguro's unreliable plot / narrator novels intentionally elude the practical reader.

But a dreamy and minor-key look into a North Korea that is only half for real and the other half an equivalent for a character's emotional tenor-- and perhaps an analog of life-as-lived under the confines of State control.

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing and ambitious first novel. Think of it as Raymond Chandler gets hardboiled and eaten cold by a North Korean bureaucracy where the good guys don't just battle crime, but have to fight through a broken, Kafkaesque maze of political nihilism, factionalism, and stoic fatalism JUST to get some gas or a cup of tea. Church's natural details are amazing, his writing is both polished and crisp, and his story is superbly well-crafted (I can imagine the idea for Inspector O slowly evolving and being worked and turned and rolled-over in Church's creative pocket like an odd, but beautiful piece of dark persimmon wood). Not since reading my first Olen Steinhauer have I been this excited to discover a new (for me) genre writer.

[Patrick Sherriff · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me more than three years to get round to this first in the Inspector O series, after enjoying the Hidden Moon, the second in the series (my brief review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). What can I say? I'm as inefficient in my reading priorities as a North Korean minister. What was true of his second novel is true of the first -- its strong points are being set in North Korea and the compelling hero being a fish out of water in the authoritarian state. A weak point is a convoluted plot that we can have no understanding of until the very end, but then, that seems only fitting given the opaque world Inspector O operates in. The frequent mentions of the weather didn't annoy me as much this time. Maybe I'm getting mellower in my advancing years, maybe it's better edited. Who can say? But I won't be leaving it quite as long to get to number three. A word of warning though, the audio book is voiced by an actor with a booming midwestern American accent that seems at odds with the material. Especially when he is called upon to do an Irish accent, which was, er, distracting, let's say.

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[Firmin · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5🌟

📝 توطئه در پیونگ‌یانگ یا همون جسدی در کوریو، از یه جهت برام کتاب غریبی بود، که معماگونه شروع شد، ولی این‌که معمای کتاب چیه خیلی هم سوال واضحی نبود. جالب‌تر این‌که این معمای نامعلوم همین‌طور تا انتهای کتاب با خواننده بود، ولی باز هم طرح سوال گنگی داشت. و جالب‌تر از همه این‌که با وجود این‌که معلوم نبود دقیقن دنبال جواب چه سوالی هستیم، کتاب تقریبن توی تمام چهارصد و حدودن پنجاه صفحه‌ای که داشت، به‌ندرت از نفس افتاد و تقریبن تمام طول داستان رو پرکشش بود! و در نهایت این‌که به نظرم قسمت عمده و اصلی داستان اصلن حتا بخش معمایی یا جنایی قصه نبود، بلکه نقدی بود به شرایط حکومت کره‌ی شمالی، کشوری که کسی نمی‌تونه خیلی با قطعیت از اون‌چه که درون‌ش،‌ و مهم‌تر از اون، درون دل مردمش می‌گذره چیزی بگه یا بنویسه. این‌که شخصیتی مثل شخصیت راوی داستان می‌تونه توی دستگاه حکومتی کشوری مثل کره‌ی شمالی وجود داشته باشه یا نه سوالیه که من جوابشو نمی‌دونم، ولی در دل قصه، این راوی یکی از شخصیت‌های جذابی بود که توی دنیای کتاب‌ها باهاش آشنا شدم و دوسش داشتم. جسارتش، بی‌خیالی‌ش در عین care کردن و مراقب بودن، بی‌تفاوت بودن‌ش نسبت به خیلی چیزها و اهمیت دادن‌ش به خیلی چیزهای دیگه، خط قرمزهای محکم‌ش در عین این بی‌خیالی‌ها و بی‌تفاوتی‌ها و از خیلی خط‌ها رد شدن‌هاش،... نمی‌تونم بگم مجموعه‌ی این‌ها برام ازش یه شخصیت موندگار ساخته؛ این رو زمان ثابت می‌کنه. ولی می‌تونم توی شمار شخصیت‌های دوست‌داشتنیِ قصه‌هام جاش بدم و امیدوار باشم که یادم بمونه و اگر باز هم اسمش رو، و البته اسم نویسنده رو، جایی روی کتابی دیدم، داشته باشم، و بخونم‌ش.
درباره‌ی ترجمه هم می‌تونم بگم که اوایل کتاب یه ذره سخت باهاش ارتباط گرفتم و ترسیدم که تا آخر همین باشه ولی روون و خوب پیش رفت و اذیتم نکرد. چندتا ایراد ویراستاری داشت البته، که صرف‌نظر ازش، تا این‌جا دومین کتاب خوبی بود که از مجموعه‌ی ادبیات پلیسی نشر قطره خوندم و امیدوارم این تجربه هم تجربه‌ی ادامه‌داری باشه.

📚 #توطئه_در_پیونگ_یانگ / کاوش‌گری‌های بازرس اُ
✍🏽 #جیمز_چرچ
🖋 #محمد_قمری_حبشی
🖨 #نشر_قطره

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the same vein of decent cops working for dictatorial regimes like my recently read Thirty-Three Teeth is James Church's A Corpse in the Koryo. Here, however, the atmosphere is far darker. Where Cotterill plays up the absurdities of the Pathet Lao's regime, Church's North Korean bureaucrats are vicious thugs and the slightest mistake could (and does) cost lives.

Inspector O is the grandson of a respected general and war hero, which gives him a certain amount of freedom denied his peers but it's a freedom that gives him the "right" to forget to wear his lapel-pin photo of the Great Leader, and it's a connection that lets him exploit his grandfather's only in an unofficial capacity.

"Church" is a pseudonym for a former intelligence agent, and his background gives a certain verisimilitude to the insane machinations the native police agencies and foreign governments engage in (ostensibly in service to the country or ideology but in reality to feather someone's nest or accumulate power against one's rivals).

As usual with the better mystery novels, it's not so much the crime as the investigator who makes or breaks the story. In fact, it's hard to see what "crime" O is investigating. Sure, there's a "corpse in the Koryo" eventually but it doesn't signify in the end, where it's revealed that O and his department have been used as bait in a vicious power struggle between Deputy Director Kang of the Investigations Division and Captain Kim of Military Security.

I like Inspector O. He's a fairly decent man, though sorely battered and cynically twisted by the horribly paranoid society he lives in. Which is the other strength of the novel: The depiction of North Korean society and how people learn to live within it.

For anyone who liked Fatherland or Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko, I'd strongly recommend this author; and I'd encourage any mystery/spy-genre fan to check Church out.

[Maddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

PROTAGONIST: Inspector O
SETTING: North Korea
SERIES: #1
RATING: 3.5
WHY: It begins when Inspector O is assigned to take a picture of a car coming from the south. He’s unable to do so since the battery in his camera is dead, a typical outcome in the totalitarian North Korean regime. He is interviewed by the Military Security and an agent in the investigations department, Kang. Somehow he’s become deeply entangled in investigating murders from the past, all the while not able to trust anyone to be straight with him other than his boss, Pak. The plot is complex and confusing. Church’s presentation of life in North Korea, where nothing much functions well at all, is illuminating. O is an outlier but Pak is able to gently keep him in line. Given the grim world that they live in, it was refreshing to find that O had a sense of humor.

[Mal Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Practically nothing works. Government, police protection, buildings, cars, roads, appliances, telephones — whatever: they’re either falling apart, damaged beyond repair, or, if you’re lucky, barely functioning. Welcome to North Korea in the 21st century, where nothing gets done without a bribe, and it’s even difficult to find a cup of tea when you want one.

Just for example, “The train to Pyongyang was late. Not like some places, where a late train means twenty minutes, even an hour on a bad day. This train didn’t come that day, or the next.”

Based in Pyongyang, the country’s largest city and its capital, Inspector O — yes, his name really is “O,” which is a common Korean surname, though more often spelled Oh, Oe, or Au — is an investigator with the Ministry of People’s Security, his territory a large swath of the capital. (The Ministry is apparently what would be called the police in other countries.) Shortly after O’s boss, Chief Inspector Pak, meets with the secretive “Captain” (really, Colonel) Kim, from Military Security Command, Inspector O’s reasonably predictable life begins to unravel. It soon emerges that a high-stakes feud is underway between Colonel Kim and Deputy Director Kang from the rival Investigations Department, an agency that seems to be analogous to the CIA. And there seems to be an uneasy connection between Kang and Pak. For starters, then, we’ve learned about three warring police agencies, and the word “warring” is no exaggeration. It transpires that “something big” is about to happen, something that seemingly will alter the destiny of all three agencies and prove to be a matter of life and death for O, Pak, and Kang. It has something to do with Japan, but we’re never quite sure what.

Yes, it’s all monumentally confusing, and the story doesn’t get any easier to understand until near the end. The author spoon-feeds us the backstory through a series of conversations between Inspector O and an Irishman named Richie Molloy, who is apparently an officer of Britain’s MI6. Molloy has cornered O in a hotel room in Budapest or Prague while O was on a mission for Pak and is recording his account of Wang’s comings and goings. These conversations alternate with the slowly unfolding story of O’s investigation into a murder that doesn’t actually take place until midway through the book! Apparently, Wang has something going for himself in Finland, and the murdered man is a Finn, as is an attractive young woman who turns up in O’s investigation. Why there should be so many Finns showing up in North Korea is beyond me. Yes, confusing.

Perhaps, though, that confusion is really the point of the tale. As Inspector O declares in an exchange with Richie, “where I live, we don’t solve cases. What is a solution in a reality that never resolves itself into anything definable? . . . I don’t connect dots. Unnecessary, because I know that nothing is a straight line. Everything is circles, overlapping circles that bleed into each other . . . For me, life consists of badly limited possibilities, but I know the parts are endlessly rearranged, always shifting, always changing. Nobody puts down their foot twice in the same place. I once heard a Westerner say, ‘What you see is what you get.’ We laughed for days about that in the office. Nothing is like that. Nobody is like that.”

James Church is a pseudonym for the American author of this and four other Inspector O novels. The books in the series have been praised by North Korea watchers as unusually perceptive. So maybe all that confusion is real.

[Kathryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I initially felt that I would like this, but then found it a little difficult to get into - possibly because I was distracted by another, very compelling book, so I temporarily put this one aside to finish that one. When I came back to it, it felt a little disjointed but I don’t know whether that was because my reading was interrupted, or because I was comparing the writing style to the other (excellent) book I’d just finished or whether this was truly disjointed.

There are some good quotes throughout the book that give some insight into the state of things in Vietnam:

'…I finally managed to tug the [window] at my seat open just as the taller of the railway policemen shouted, “And don’t let me catch you again, or I’ll shoot.” He turned to his companion. “Or I would if I had any ammunition.”‘

‘“What time is the train to Manpo?”
“When it runs, it gets here between ten in the morning and five in the afternoon.”'

I found it a little difficult to keep track of the story and what was happening and why, however I wasn’t altogether sure whether this might have been the author’s intention to further illustrate the confusion of living and working in North Korea.

Overall I enjoyed it, although I’m not sure that I will continue on with the series. I certainly won’t be rushing out to grab the next one.

[Rebecca Huston · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was one of those novels that plays with your head for a bit. Inspector O, a man of little importance in the Ministry of People's Security finds himself thrown into a case of smuggling, illicit dealing, a Western reporter, and a beautiful girl named Lena. But it's more than a tale of finding out whodunnit. There's little touches of unexpected beauty, classic Korean poetry, and a real sense of being there. If you like your thrillers to be tense and nervewracking, this will do quite nicely. This gets four stars and a recommeded from me.

For the longer review, please go here"

http://www.epinions.com/review/James_...

[Barbpie · Rating 4 out of 5]

First in a series set in North Korea written by a "former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia," which shows. I can't wait to get my hands on Hidden Moon.

[Shaun · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know the author has a lot of knowledge about North Korea but not much of it made it in to this book. Based on other books I've read, true accounts by North Korean refugees as well as a work by a former British diplomat to Pyong Yang, it's hard to imagine a North Korean with Inspector O's personality. He's rude and snarky to people. It's my understanding that you can only get away with being disrespectful to people of lower Songbun in North Korea. Granted, Inspector O is of a very high songbun as his grandfather was a revolutionary hero in the fight against the Japanese. But he was rude to his colleagues and even his superiors. I don't recall reading anything flat out inaccurate in the book but I don't think this book accurately captured just how stifling life in the Hermit Kingdom is. In many respects, it could have been about any country. It didn't have to take place in the DPRK at all. I might pick up the next book in the series at some point but I'm not in a huge hurry to do so.

[Anastasia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really do not know much about North Korea. It probably hindered my understanding of the subjects covered in the novel. So please do not take my low rating to heart. Try this one for yourselves. You may understand much more than me.

[Gabriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Qué diferente ler unha novela policiaca que ten lugar en Asia! O autor foi un espía nos seus tempos mozos, o cal lle engade mais interese a xa de por sí intensa trama.

Recomendadísima.

[erforscherin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can see why the reviews are all over the place for this book - it's definitely not your typical mystery, though the more I think on it, the more I wonder if that's not a misclassification anyway. Koryo is by any measure one weird hybrid of a book. With the intrigue and politics it's easy to think of John Le Carre, and the dark richness of the descriptions is definitely Raymond Chandler's noir all over, but then things get a bit harder to describe. It's more travelogue than police procedural, less a straight thriller novel than a meditation that just happens to have some exciting moments. And there's certainly no neat resolution to much of anything: good people die, and minor characters die, and the shadows and murky forces keep playing their games, undisturbed and still mostly incomprehensible to anyone not in the highest levels of power.

Which means that it's hard to know where to start evaluating this book, too. In a normal mystery or police procedural, I'd wonder what the heck was going on with the plot here: The intrigue gets off to a nice early start, but then nothing much happens; for all the talk that something big is coming, that everything's about to change, there's nothing but traveling and tension until the 50% mark... and then a confused jumble of action, and finally a last-minute "this explains everything!" explanation (that really only answers about half the questions any sane person would have at that point) tucked away breathlessly in the last few pages, and then it just ends abruptly.

With that said - where the plot feels frustratingly incomplete, the descriptions are beautiful, and easily clawed back an extra star from me for being by far the best parts of the book. The messy, half-seen world of politics and power struggles among North Korean party leadership is - surprisingly? - a natural match for the brooding noir atmosphere (extra props for the classic Korean poems at the start of each section, which are haunting and perfectly true to tone). Ditto, the culture and travelogue passages are fascinating in themselves, honest and colorful without ever turning kitschy or exoticizing - I would cheerfully read more of that, please!

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-written and compelling, the novel moves back and forth through time as North Korean Police Inspector O is drawn into a case which starts as a simple stakeout of a lonely highway. As one body after another is discovered, the investigation becomes like a dangerous maze with no clear way out and very few allies on whom he can rely. There are so many secrets, and everyone seems to know more than our beleaguered policeman with the soul of a carpenter.
One drawback is that there are so many twists and turns, I'm still not entirely certain what really happened in the end. The murder victims are never really developed and are hardly ever seen; they serve more as plot points rather than three-dimensional characters. The story focuses more on O and his superior officer, who knows more than he's telling, as well as an enigmatic Korean Intelligence agent who keeps O dangling on the hook, drawing him deeper and deeper into political intrigue. The most interesting characters are the ones O meets during his investigation: the hotel employee that just wants to avoid trouble, the tour guide who has more than pamphlets to offer, the local policeman who would rather be singing and schmoozing with the tourists, and a woman with a past who spends plenty of time romancing the inspector, and just as much time keeping him at arms length.
If you're looking for a conventional murder mystery/police procedural, you may want to sit this one out. But if you're looking for an atmospheric story with haunting characters and an in-depth look at the sociopolitical intrigues of living in North Korea, you might want to give it a go.

[Diane Clavette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pleased to meet Inspector O, a man of hidden depths. My introduction to North Korea was certainly influenced by the events taking place at the time. To say I felt a bit anxious would be an understatement. The constant mistrust hanging about, the not knowing what was really going on and the need to keep thoughts where they originate created a muscle tension that must permeate the whole of the country. With my western thought processes I found I was forced to alter my thinking in order to understand the mystery presented.
Despite the tension, there was a beauty to the way O viewed much through nature and a sadness that the mountains were the only sure thing. Yes, take time to smell the roses, but is there time?
The mystery was definitely compelling, but the feel of North Korea portrayed was astonishing.

[Gramarye · Rating 4 out of 5]

North Korean spy novel/police procedural may sound like a tough concept for any author to tackle, but Church does about as well as anyone could wish. Inspector O (who I first came across through Church's short blog posts on 38 North) is a fine match for any noir protagonist, and though the twisting, violent plot can be hard to follow (even for those who've done some research on North Korean politics and history), it has a pitch-perfect atmosphere...not least because of the high body count by the end. I'll be interested to see what other adventures Church has for his inspector.

[Derek · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read these mystery/thrillers set in foreign lands as much for the insight into another culture as for the mystery, so this novel was a disappointment when I learned almost nothing about North Korea. It's an authoritarian system. Great. I didn't even get much of a sense of "asia-ness" about it. As for the actual mystery - nobody actually seemed to care about the "Corpse in the Koryo" hotel, and it's solution was a throwaway at the very end.

[Esme · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the prose is very elegant and quite superior to most of those books in the genre, the plot was overly complicated and surprisingly uninteresting. Definitely not a page turner, and I really had to force myself to finish it.

[Michael Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first Inspector O novel. Set in North Korea, this novel captures the insularity, the repressiveness, the political intrigue, all the while unwinding a nifty little mystery for the Inspector. I will read more.

[Alondra Miller · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 Stars

This was dry at best and boring at most. Things picked up after the halfway point, but by then, I just didn't care.

After that, I may end up reading book 2 to see if things are not as convoluted. We'll see.

[Ludditus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although a bit clumsy and a somewhat exaggerated in those parts where it tries to be something between Gérard de Villiers’s SAS and 007, the Inspector O series deserves a solid four stars for originality, and also because the first installment made me curious about the other five novels.

My knowledge of North Korea is not that much beyond that of other people, but I profess to have been particularly curious about that surrealist country, and I happened to have read a number of books on DPRK, watched all the films on the matter, and hundreds of YouTube videos, being them propaganda or not. To evaluate the credibility of a plot that takes place in such a godforsaken land where nothing is normal, it helps to have lived—as it’s my case—in Ceausescu’s Romania in the 1980s, and to have read quite a lot about the life in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Still, I can’t know as much on DPRK as the pseudonymous author—described as “a former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia”—presumably knows.

Starting from the approximation that James Church’s description of places and events feel quite plausible, there are still some unanswered questions.

For those who don’t know the realities of the DPRK, it’s worth mentioning that Pyongyang is not like the rest of the country. The Party and the various security agencies cannot control the huge corruption and the smuggling that takes place near the border with China. Pyongyang is a cage—the rest of the country is mostly emptiness and retardation populated by peasants and scattered with a few decrepit cities that look as on a different planet and a different century.

And yet... The book was published in 2006, when Kim Jong-il was still in charge. Things were a bit more under control back then. I expect that not everyone was able to own and use US dollars the way they can now. I’d thought they’d be sent to camps for that—and for other things. The DPRK society described in the book rather matches 2016, not 2006.

Then, Inspector O, “a poor, dumb inspector with unit 826 of the People's Security Ministry,” is too small a pawn to possibly have been sent in various European capitals in the past. He was not an intelligence agent, so everything about Budapest and other places couldn’t have happened in my opinion: “During one of my first trips abroad, when I was still in the Ministry's liaison office and traveling to Berlin to help set up a visit by the Minister, I'd been ordered to Geneva to pick up instructions that I knew would make no sense and could only complicate my assignment.”

But let’s ignore that and enjoy the story—a story of the feud between the too many security services of that impossible country. Inspector O is no more than a detective inspector in the North Korean Ministry of People's Security—their equivalent of a Home Office. But then there is the Investigations Department—which I suppose it’s actually the State Security Department aka Ministry of State Security—and the dreaded Military Security Command, the worst of all.

Some might describe the plot as quite bland, but I found it remarkably good for a debut. Creating the atmosphere of such an absurd country is no easy job. Despite all the scary parts of North Korea’s absurd society, we’re made to understand how some people can find poetry and beauty and some sort of a patriotic attachment even in such life-threatening places. Well, maybe not quite understand, but at least made aware.

The scenes of an interrogation of Inspector O by an Irish intelligence officer are a cliché used as a pretext to narrate unrelated facts, especially when put in contrast to whatever preconceptions the Westerners might have about DPRK. I’m not fond of them, to say the least.

The novel doesn’t however manage to fully describe the burdensome atmosphere of an extraordinarily totalitarian state. Even as the great famine of the 1990s was gone, life was not that easy in the early 2000s, yet we’re not told of almost any of the daily hardships—Inspector O seems to be living on the tea he can barely find and on a minimum of food we don‘t really know about.

As for the several exaggerations, I’ll only mention Grandma Pak, then the omnipresence, omniscience or the unlikely networking and reciprocal loyalty of too many people—in a country where nobody trusts no one. Imagining that the action took place in 2016 instead of 2006 doesn’t help much.

The ending is a bit disappointing, but hardly a surprise. In hindsight, it makes most of some people’s acts look highly irrational—but again, what is rational in DPRK? I’m not sure I can realize how it is to be living in such a country!

Heading for volume two in the series...

RANDOM QUOTES:
— "Listening is the anvil that forms the sword, the fire that melts the lead for the bullet. Listening is the time to recoup, to gather your wits, to plan your attack. If you listen to anyone carefully enough, you'll hear the slip that points to their vitals. It's the compass on the killing map. People talk, but no one wants to say anything, because someone might listen."

— (His grandpa:) "Don't listen to anyone who tells you about loyalty to an idea. You're alone," he said. "Without your family, you're alone."

— "I'm busy this morning," she said. "A bus load of Romanian basketball players is arriving. Some friendship tournament. They are the worst. Tall, skinny, they all think because they have such long legs they are comedians. You should see what they do to the rooms."

— "Listen, Richie, where I live, we don't solve cases."

— "I once heard a Westerner say, 'What you see is what you get.' We laughed for days about that at the office. Nothing is like that. Nobody is like that. But it's what you people want to believe."

[Becky · Rating 3 out of 5]

I randomly came across this book in the local library. Seeing the setting was North Korea and a murder mystery, I decided to give it a try. It turned out to be quite a challenge to picture the scenery and setting of North Korea. In one way the countryside must be beautiful but living and working in the buildings must be depressing and stifling. The details of the mystery are sparse and slow to unravel due to all of the bureaucracy and not being quite clear as to who was watching whom and who was a spy, etc. The lack of everyday items we take for granted was quite eye opening. Inspector O seems to be the protagonist of several more mysteries. I will give the next one, Hidden Moon, a try before deciding whether I am a fan or not.

[Translator Monkey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. Doc wasn't displeased with reading this, but it really wasn't all that captivating. It's the first in a series of books about a Police Inspector from North Korea. I think it is the last in the series I will have read.

Nothing I can put my finger on. The author is a solid writer with (apparently) a good background in detective work in contemporary North Korea, but man, for a short book, he took a long journey to get to the point.

On a scale of 1 to 10, Doc gives it a C.

[Evan · Rating 3 out of 5]

James Church's A Corpse in the Koryo details a North Korean police inspector's attempt to solve a murder while grappling with the dangerous maze of North Korea's dysfunctional bureaucracy. Church's storytelling can be difficult to follow at times but still keeps the reader engaged throughout. Overall, it's a good choice for those interested in a mystery or spy thriller.

[William Walter · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing is well done--creates textured imagery without a wasted word. Good reading although the plot was revealed in a rush at the end, limiting the reader's capacity to reach any conclusions about the story along the way.