Customer Reviews

Hidden Moon (Thorndike Reviewers' Choice)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was looking forward to a good read after a sterling Wall Street Journal review. Sad to write, it did not measure up. Inspector O is a good character---a Marlowe type seeking truth at all costs in a society, North Korea, which hides it at all costs. But the plot is disjointed. There are three or four threads(fair enough, a typical scheme) but they never get pulled together. An important character is not even introduced until mid-way through the novel. The writing is sometimes more than decent, hitting lyrical notes from time to time. I will give any third effort a look(or maybe try the first) but there is too much good noir out there to take a Korean side trip.

I was really pleased to see this come out because I really enjoyed "The Corpse in the Koryo". Unfortunately, though, it doesn't measure up. The prose is vivid and the characters are nicely sketched, and there is the same nicely done atmosphere as the first book, but the plot doesn't make a lot of sense. And the lack of sense doesn't reflect deliberate ambiguity, which can work sometimes, but rather what struck me as sloppiness. I normally don't worry too much about plotting, and I am sympathetic to the idea that in a place like North Korea, there would be a lot of chaos and strange goings-on, but I still think there was a problem with the execution. The conclusion in particular had a tacked-on, hastily-written feel to it that made me think the author couldn't figure out how to end the book so finally wrote something in a hurry.

I do hope we see some more of Inspector Oh.

As mentioned in my first review I read his first book more for the insight into North Korea than for the mystery aspect. This book is less about what day to day life is like in North Korea and more about the absuridty of living in a country where nothing is what it seems to be. The character development of Inspector O is outstanding. His constant banter with his boss and others throughout the book brings humor to what otherwise would be a humorless situation. The beginning of the book was a tad slow and then it really picked up and I couldn't put it down until the end.

Church's second Inspector O novel finds the North Korean detective feeling his way gingerly, reluctantly, stubbornly around a sensitive case - a bank robbery, the first ever in Pyongyang.

" `There's nothing in the training manual about bank robberies.' I pointed at the green-covered book on the floor behind me. It had been there when I came into the office years ago, and there had never been a reason to disturb it. `That means no standard procedures, no approved plan of operations. I wouldn't know where to start,' " he tells his boss, knowing it's a no-win case, one he's meant not to solve, probably, but to appear to be trying to solve. Probably.

Sure enough, things are immediately hinky, with a dead bank robber he's not allowed to see, an attractive bank manager who talks in riddles, a Scottish cop he's expected to baby-sit and a State Security man looking over his shoulder.

"Hidden Moon" more than fulfills the promise of Church's first, "The Corpse in the Koryo," with its likable, canny, sardonic protagonist and succinct, witty - sometimes hilarious - prose. Church, the pseudonym of a former intelligence operative in North Korea, paints a detailed, absorbing picture of an authoritarian regime built on shifting sands of paranoia and secrecy.

Like "A Corpse in the Koryo", "Hidden Moon" creates more questions than it answers. It may not satisfy a reader's need for clarity and closure. Comfort must be found elsewhere. The opening line is a gem: "The afternoon lay strangled in a gloom of Chinese dust." Later, with only the slightest context, "Native to Korea is one venomous snake, whose bite is lethal but which is not aggressive. The tigers left long ago. New bears have been seen." Gentle humor blossoms: "There was an old monk that lived at the temple after the war. No one bothered him. A couple of political types came up that first September and asked him a few questions. When they were leaving, they told me it was my job to watch him. It was funny and we all laughed. Setting a blind man to watch a monk."

Author "James Church," a career diplomat with years of experience in Asia, including, one assumes, North Korea, sets his second mystery starring Inspector O of the Ministry of People's Security, in the country's capital of Pyongyang. Though O is an Inspector, he has no idea who is really in charge of the investigations to which he is assigned. His Ministry is constantly locking horns with SSD, the State Security Department, and turf wars often erupt over jurisdiction. For Inspector O, the best approach has always been to keep his head down, do what he is told, try to laugh at the absurdities, and close his eyes to the atrocities.

A robbery at the Gold Star Bank, the first ever in Pyongyang, challenges the Ministry and Inspector O, especially since O is not called to deal with it until a week after it has happened. Still, the Ministry is ordered to solve the crime by the end of the month. O quickly discovers that someone, somewhere, is controlling his access to information, however, and he fears that he and the Ministry are being set up to fail. One of the robbers has been hit by a bus and killed while escaping, but the morgue denies that they have the body that was delivered to them. Private guards, not government security, have been on duty at the bank, and one of them disappeared immediately before the robbery. Strange characters who seem to be involved in a local bar called Club Blue also seem to be connected to people at the bank, and there are hints that the robbery was the work of foreigners.

Inspector O's uncertainties and confusion about the case determine the structure of the novel. Whatever confusion O may have about what is going on, who is doing what, and who is in charge, is matched in the reader, who obtains his information exclusively from O. This creates a free-flowing, often disjointed narrative which can ultimately be as frustrating for the reader as it is for Inspector O--until the ending, of course--a blockbuster filled with surprises.

O, who was iconoclastic and irreverent in Corpse in the Koryo, has now graduated to mordant satire in his view of life here. With tongue in cheek, he openly directs his sarcasm toward those who seem to be in charge, his conversations with them sometimes resembling a script from The Three Stooges. As the ironies of his life turn into absurdities and threaten to turn the investigation into a farce, O becomes a far more engaging character than he was in the previous novel. With an unusual mixture of dark humor and violence, Hidden Moon recreates the frazzled and frantic life of a mid-level bureaucrat in Pyongyang and casts light on a life that offers little hope of change. Mary Whipple

A Corpse in the Koryo (Inspector O Novels)
Hidden Moon: An Inspector O Novel (Inspector O Novels)
Bamboo and Blood: An Inspector O Novel (Inspector O Novels)
The Man with the Baltic Stare: An Inspector O Novel (Inspector O Novels)

I read murder novels for escape, but I also like to learn about different places. This fits the bill and is filled with numerous twists and turns. I look forward to reading more of the Inspector O Novels!

This is the second Inspector O book by Mr. Church. I thought the first, A Corpse in the Koryo, was much more interesting given that it had more North Korea local color. It is a little annoying that the solution to the crime is not that clear in either book.

a bank robbery in North Korea - the first one ever in the country, isnot that a great plot you can work around

Inspector O is really a unique character, there is not any crime novel like that.
the atmosphere is very dense and the plot has so many twists and turns that you are left to the end guessing.
its also a funny read in many ways as the author describes quite in some depth how the bizarre burocrazy in a place like north corea penetrates every aspect of life

all in all - i enjoyed reading it - its quite different from other crime novels i read, its a good read, though not "great" - so i only gave it 4 stars instead of 5

looking forward to get "a corpse in the Koryo" as other reviewers wrote its better than Hidden Moon

In a police state, even the police are policed. That seems obvious enough. But in Hidden Moon, Inspector O of the Ministry of People's Security attempts to operate with some degree of integrity in a Pyongyang house of mirrors that makes grasping the truth impossibly difficult.

In addition to scrutiny and subterfuge by his own authoritarian bureaucracy (if that's not a redundancy), he's watched and manipulated by the Military Security, State Security, Public Security and other top-secret forces that no one dare challenge. It's a world where one misstep or ill-chosen word can land you in a labor camp for decades. Where informers are everywhere and it's wise to trust no one, not even your nominal colleagues. Layer on top of that numerous clandestine international organizations, operatives and spies--from Russia, Kazakhstan, China, the U.K., Germany and more--and you find yourself dizzied and disoriented by the double-dealing and multi-faceted intrigues.

In the 2007 St. Martin's Minotaur police procedural by James Church--a pseudonym for "a former Western Intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia"--you experience a gritty and believable virtual visit to the North Korean capital that will make you immediately strike it from you holiday list. That's unless you enjoy cold noodles, second-rate liquor, incessant surveillance and institutionalized torture, a totalitarian culture where citizens are forbidden to have foreigners into their homes and must leave hotel-room doors open when visiting.

The convoluted plot and international intrigue of this novel would never have been enough to keep me with it. But the dark wit and caustic edginess of O makes him a good companion and tour guide--someone who can pick out the "neighborhood watch" people by the way they walk and who sardonically chronicles the inefficiencies of an inept and ruthless regime, one which tortures even its own police officers to get information.

A regime where every word spoken anywhere, in any context, must be guarded. When O once sarcastically corrects his Scottish coordinate--there to help arrange security for a visiting UK dignitary--with the words, "Perhaps you don't understand, James, my friend," he immediately realizes his error:

"I kicked myself, hard. A sarcastic reference to Boswell as `my friend' would go down on the transcript as just that--'my friend.' I never knew a transcriber with an ear for humor."

Of course in Orwellian Pyongyang one assumes that every conversation is recorded.

Yet, despite - or perhaps because of - the living gray world Church depicts here, I will likely return to him for his first, acclaimed Inspector O mystery, A Corpse in the Koryo, and to his latest, Bamboo and Blood.