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The Man with the Baltic Stare: An Inspector O Novel Hardcover – August 17, 2010

by James Church (Author)

24 customer reviews

Book 4 of 5 in the Inspector O Novels Series

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From the author of the critically acclaimed Inspector O series comes another riveting novel set in the mysterious world of North Korea

Autumn brings unwelcome news to Inspector O: he has been wrenched from retirement and ordered back to Pyongyang for a final assignment. The two Koreas, he learns, are now cooperating—very quietly—to maintain stability in the North. Stability requires that Inspector O lead an investigation into a crime of passion committed by the young man who has been selected as the best possible leader of a transition government. O is instructed to make sure that the case goes away. Remnants of the old regime, foreign powers, rival gangs—all want a piece of the action, and all make it clear that if O values his life, he will not get in their way. O isn’t sure where his loyalties lie, and he doesn’t have much time to figure out whether ‘tis better to be noble or be dead.

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Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Inspector O, the wily North Korean police detective, has retired to a mountaintop to shape wood with his grandfather's tools. It's really a kind of exile, though, as O was ordered to the mountain by the government. Even so, he accepts his new life. But when summoned back to Pyongyang, he discovers that the city has changed; food is plentiful, streets are well lit, and new construction is everywhere. And everyone he meets, even a hotel bellhop, seems to know things that O does not. In time, O learns that his new superior is a South Korean, and that a reunification of North and South is planned. O's assignment is to roil the waters of a murder investigation in Macau because the anointed leader of the new Korea is the prime suspect. But at every turn, O is threatened—by his superior, by gangsters from various countries that see opportunity in the reunification, and by a mysterious Chinese colonel. Even O's remarkable Buddhist-Taoist sangfroid is stretched to its limits. Many novelists cheerfully admit that writing fiction allows them to invent everything. Few have as much freedom as Church, because North Korea is so little known. Each Inspector O novel is a strange new trip through the looking glass, and this one is every bit as praiseworthy as its predecessors. --Thomas Gaughan

Review

Praise for The Man with the Baltic Stare:

“The central character is a Pyongyang police officer, the likeable Inspector O, who knows that in North Korea mysteries are never solved, just absorbed into larger mysteries…. Mr. Church keeps his own counsel, so it is not known how he comes by his information, but the scenic details and atmospherics suggest more than a passing acquaintance with the realities of life in North Korea.” --The Economist

“Church once again shows an extraordinary ability to bring that enigmatic country to life, a feat made even more impressive by the wholly plausible near-future setting. Satisfied readers will hail Church as the equal of le Carré.” –Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Each Inspector O novel is a strange new trip through the looking glass, and this one is every bit as praiseworthy as its predecessors." --Booklist, starred review

“While publishers comb the fjords for the next Stieg Larsson, readers devoted to bleak international noir would do better to turn their attention from Northern Europe to Asia. North Korea, to be exact. The hero of The Man With the Baltic Stare, the fourth and perhaps last in a series of excellent crime novels following Inspector O, might not know how to use the cell phone he sometimes has to carry. But like Larsson's heroine, a petite Asperger-ish libertarian in the land of large blondes and big government, the self-contained Inspector O bucks the stereotypes that we associate with his country.” --Slate.com

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Product details

Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Minotaur Books; 1st edition (August 17, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0312372922
ISBN-13: 978-0312372927
Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 1.1 x 8.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
Average Customer Review: 24 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,668,200 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4634 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Political
- #5848 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers & Suspense > Spies & Politics > Political
- #6741 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Mystery > International Mystery & Crime

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Too difficult to figure out what's going on

ByMal Warwickon July 11, 2016

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

In the closing years of the past decade, beginning in 2008, North Korea began descending into chaos as its dictator, Kim Jong-Il, fell gravely ill. His youngest son, Kim Jong-Un, then only in his mid-twenties, began to emerge as the heir apparent, crowding aside not just his older brothers but the senior officials who wanted to end the Kim dynasty and seize power themselves. The outside world learned few of the details about the power struggle underway, but it was clearly ferocious and led to considerable bloodletting. One or two highly public executions surfaced in the news, but there were undoubtedly many more under wraps.

North Korea in chaos

In The Man with the Baltic Stare, James Church re-imagines these circumstances in the fourth of his detective novels featuring Inspector O. Church’s scenario — possibly based in great part on fact, as Church served the US government in Southeastern and Eastern Asia for many years — powerful outside forces struggled for dominance in alliance with different factions within the faltering North Korean government. South Korea, China, and Macao-based Chinese gangsters all clashed with one another, as much to prevent the others from coming out on top as to gain power themselves, resisted by those in the country’s government who weren’t allied with any of the outsiders. In fact, and this seems almost certainly to be true, no outsider wished to take on responsibility for running a desperately poor and backward country, as the cost might have been comparable to the hundreds of billions of dollars the West German government was forced to spend to integrate East Germany when reunification came in 1990.

Intrigue and confusion in a failing state

Unfortunately, Church doesn’t make this three-way (actually four-way) conflict clear until more than halfway through The Man with the Baltic Stare. The novel masquerades as a murder mystery. Inspector O, formerly the North Korean equivalent of a police detective, has been living in isolation on a mountaintop, having left the force under an agreement never to never to speak to anyone about the unsavory political events he’s witnessed in his career. In the first half of the book, he is mysteriously snatched from his mountain home and pressed into service by an obviously powerful South Korean major to investigate the murder of a highly placed North Korean official in a luxurious Macao hotel room. It’s unclear whether the major wants O to identify the killer or to cover up the incident. Strange, very strange.

The previous Inspector O novels consistently portray life in North Korea as uncertain, confusing, and rife with intrigue. Inspector O routinely finds that the origins of the mysteries he is investigating are hidden and that no one he encounters along the way is likely to be who he says he is or do what he has promised to do. This novel carries that theme of confusion to a new height. Reading the book is a maddening exercise: confusion undermines the suspense. However, it’s worthwhile as interesting speculation on what really took place in North Korea between 2008 and 2012, when the ascendancy of Kim Jong-Un became clear.