Book Review: Hidden Moon

Reviewed By: Lynn Harnett

Hidden Moon     Amazon US TPB Amazon US HC Amazon Canada TPB Amazon Canada HC
James Church
Class/Genre:   Mystery   Police Procedural
Series: Inspector O # 2
St. Martin’s Minotaur, Oct. 2007
Mystery, Asian fiction, North Korea, Police Procedure, Series

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.

Lynn Harnett

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Lynn Harnett