A Corpse in the Koryo
by:
James Church (author)
"On the surface, A Corpse in the Koryo is a crackling good mystery novel, filled with unusual characters involved in a complex plot that keeps you guessing to the end."---Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post One of Publishers Weekly Top 100 Books of 2006One of Booklist's Best Genre Fiction of...
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"On the surface, A Corpse in the Koryo is a crackling good mystery novel, filled with unusual characters involved in a complex plot that keeps you guessing to the end."---Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post One of Publishers Weekly Top 100 Books of 2006One of Booklist's Best Genre Fiction of 2006One of the Chicago Tribune's best mystery/thrillers of 2006 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 decade's-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. 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. ". . . an outstanding crime novel. . . . a not-to-be-missed reading experience. " ---Library Journal (starred) "Inspector O is completely believable and sympathetic . . . The writing is superb, too . . . richly layered and visually evocative."---Booklist (starred) ". . . an impressive debut that calls to mind such mystery thrillers as Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park. . . ." ---Publishers Weekly (starred)
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780312374310 (0312374313)
ASIN: 312374313
Publish date: September 4th 2007
Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur
Pages no: 288
Edition language: English
Category:
Literature,
Cultural,
Book Club,
Mystery,
Detective,
Asian Literature,
Asia,
Spy Thriller,
Espionage,
Thriller,
Mystery Thriller,
Crime,
Suspense
Series: Inspector O (#1)
A Corpse in the Koryo by James Church is the first in the series of crime novel featuring Inspector O, set in the totalitarian country of North Korea. The novels opens with Inspector O, handed with a camera waiting on a hill, waiting for a car to pass, which he is supposed to take a snap of. The ca...
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...
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 ...
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 vi...
This book has garnered rave reviews from just about everyone so I was really looking forward to reading it but really had to struggle to finish it. The setting in North Korea was interesting and the main character was pretty well fleshed out but I did not care for the structure of the story and tho...