A Corpse in the Koryo
by James Church
Thomas Dunne/St Martin's Minotaur, HK$187
Inspector O is, in most respects, a typical crime-novel hero. A world-weary idealist who gulps vodka and speaks in clipped cop patois, cut from the same timeworn cloth as Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. But there's one big difference: Inspector O works for the North Korean government.
Therein lies the ingenious conceit of James Church's debut novel, a hard-boiled police procedural set in the world's harshest police state.
The pseudonymous author, who claims to be a former western intelligence agent, seems to have more than a passing familiarity with the terrain. He writes vividly about the mountains that are central to North Korea's national mythology, for instance. Elsewhere, he describes a deflating encounter between Inspector O and one of Pyongyang's notoriously officious female traffic officers.