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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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 Espionage Mystery Thriller & Suspense Fiction Heartfelt

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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At first I was concerned that I had jumped into th e middle of the series, but I kept on listening. it was well worth the wait!

Slow build up to a great finish!

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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.

A strange detective story in a strange land

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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.

Raymond Chandler meets Franz Kafka in N. Korea

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Any additional comments?

I listened for 4 hours, continuing to hope that something would develop in this story, but it just had the interest of a limp pancake.

I tried, but no story there. I gave up.

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Would you try another book from James Church and/or Feodor Chin?

I've read all of James Church's books and will continue to do so and I imagine there are many books that Feodor Chin would be very good at narrating, Jeeves stories come to mind. He has a very optimistic and bright voice, which is great until you start doing the voice of a serious to the point of solemn inspector in a prison of a country surrounded by starving people. Church is a great author and Chin seems like a good narrator, but whoever matched these two up needs to find another line of work.
Sorry, I wouldn't be so upset if I didn't like the Inspector O novels so much. This is the worst matched narration since somebody decided they should do Easy Rawlins with an effeminate voice.

What was one of the most memorable moments of A Corpse in the Koryo?

Hearing the narrators voice for the first time.

How could the performance have been better?

Remind him that this is not a feel good buddy story.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from A Corpse in the Koryo?

I never read or listen to abridgements.

Any additional comments?

I think these novels are good enough that they should be done over by someone like Frank Muller.

Serious drama done as zany madcap caper

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