A Corpse in the Koryo Audiobook By James Church cover art

A Corpse in the Koryo

The Inspector O Novels, Book 1

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A Corpse in the Koryo

By: James Church
Narrated by: Feodor Chin
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About this listen

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 that 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.

©2006 James Church (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Police Procedural Suspense Mystery Fiction Espionage Heartfelt
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Critic reviews

“James Church does a better job of describing the isolated, impoverished, corrupt, and out-of-touch life in the North than anything I have seen.” (Newt Gingrich)

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A strange detective story in a strange land

A Corpse in the Koryo is an unusual detective read. The hero “Inspector O” is a North Korean detective! For any writer, setting a novel in North Korea would be a difficult task. “James Church” (pen name) however is an insider, a North Korea watcher who worked in intelligence. Therefore, his novel has a ring of authenticity, evoking the government-inspired paranoia that is a feature of life in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Inspector O is the classic hard-boiled detective pursuing the truth behind the murder of a foreigner in Pyongyang’s strange Koryo Hotel. But the story takes us to the wild borderland with China, where it appears a bit of anarchy reigns, with one military group pitted against another in smuggling operations with murderous fallout. Of course, Inspector O solves the mystery in a complex story, sometimes too complex. This detective novel gives the reader a good ride in a mysterious land. Take this one for a spin.

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