Better than the average first mystery. Plot suitably twisted . Good charecterization and nice bits of North Korean color. Shades of porfiry petrovich ( )

The Corpse in the Koryo by James Church has been on my to-read pile for a while. I don't read much straight genre fiction anymore but hard-boiled is one of the few exceptions, and I won't lie: I've always been on the lookout for hardboiled stories set in unusual places and I think setting one in North Korea is one of the more unusual out there short of the end of the world (The Last Policeman, another great one).

As a result the novel inevitably kind of leans into spy novel territory. The usual hardboiled systemic corruption comes in this novel as a result of the state's totalitarian nature. This means that much of the tension comes from Inspector O's moral code being less about finding the truth regardless of danger and more about doing the best he can to keep his department (which is just him and his direct supervisor) from being used as a pawn in the factional conflicts going on in the NK government.

The major characters around O, like Chief Pak and the military commanders like Kang and Kim tend to hide a lot from him either to keep him out of trouble or to manipulate him, so it does create a really kind of compelling mystery as the pieces start to click into place but has the problem where O himself lacks a lot of...agency in what's happening to him. It makes sense given the setting, of course, but the first third of the novel is really just O getting shuffled around the countryside while machinations happen behind the curtain and the seeds of later plot are planted, so the pacing and suspense kind of lags a bit. O is an observant character, as detectives in the genre usually are, so his descriptions of the people and places are quite lovely and poetic, meaning that those sections aren't entirely without charm.

Pak leaned forward when he walked, sailing into a wind no one else could feel. For someone who examined ideas seamlessly, his thoughts gliding like a razor cutting silk, he moved with a surprising lack of grace, shoulders hunched, arms swinging fitfully just out of rhythm with his steps. He never looked comfortable with gravity; it was a concession he seemed unwilling to make. As a man, Pak was handsome. The shaggy gray hair made his crisp features seem more delicate and finely wrought. Everything fit perfectly on his small face, even the hint of a frown that rested almost constantly on his lips and the elusive sense of worry that never left his shining eyes.

The ever present threat of the secret police - O describes them as regularly entering his apartment just to move things around and remind him that they're still watching him - creates this alluring prose where characters never fully say what they mean, where everyone speaks in half truths. It creates a surreal, and almost farcical world for O to operate in; a world where Pak and O discuss the case by leaving their office and going to a children's park to talk, sitting on a swingset so they can't be heard by the listening devices planted.

>Pak laughed out loud. “A problem.” He laughed again, a long, rolling laugh, so that pretty soon I joined in. The two of us, sitting by a rusty swing set, laughing. A few people walked by, but no one stopped.We went down the stairs into the street. “Ever notice the way the sunlight dances on the river, Inspector?” The river was several blocks away, hidden behind buildings that were empty and served no purpose except as a source of shade for crowds waiting for a bus in the late afternoon. Pak couldn’t see the river; he was just keeping up a one-sided conversation. “You should try your hand at poetry, Inspector. Maybe join a club studying ancient dance.”“Listen, Richie, where I live, we don’t solve cases. What is a solution in a reality that never resolves itself into anything definable? For you, life is optimistic, endless in possibilities, but you think the parts are limited and self-contained. That’s why you make lists. You think it is possible to check off what is done. Me, I don’t ever make a list. What if someone sees it? It would lack something important, surely, and that would be evidence to be used against me. Not today, maybe, but someday. For the same reason, I don’t draw diagrams. 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.”

"Bleeding circles?”

“To solve a case you have to put the wind in a jar. 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 at the office. Nothing is like that. Nobody is like that. But it’s what you people want to believe. Straightforward, direct, what’s the term?”

“Transparent.” ( )

I am not sure about this book. I thought it was going to be your typical murder mystery, but it was not. It takes place in North Korea so there is a storyline about the Military Police, Investigation Bureau and a network of citizens. There is a murder but that is not really the story. Inspector O is sent to a hillside to take a picture of a vehicle. The camera has dead batteries so he does not get the picture. He is sent up north but he is not sure why. He meets up with Kang, and his network. He is threatened by Military Police, then gets a frantic message to get pack to Pyongyang. He is assigned the "Murder at the Koryo" which has very few leads. Pak, his boss does not want him to follow the leads he stumbles across. It is all very difficult to follow at times, but did hold my interest. I was not happy with the ending, but it did seem to fit well with everything else that happened. I will read the next Inspector O series to see if it is more what I enjoy reading before I put him on the shelf. ( )

I have to admit, I never entirely got caught up in the plot, which was a little bit confusing and convoluted. But I thought Church did a great job with atmosphere and scene-setting (it helps that I've been completely obsessed with North Korea ever since I read Nothing to Envy) and I thought Inspector O was a great character. I will definitely be checking out more books in this series. ( )

read a while back ( )