Church weaves a story with beautifully spare prose and layered descriptions of a country and a people he knows well after decades as an intelligence officer. This chilling portrayal leaves readers wondering if what at first seems unknowable may simply be too familiar for comfort.

On the surface, A Corpse in the Koryo is a crackling good mystery novel, filled with unusual characters involved in a complex plot that keeps you guessing to the end.
---Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post

One of Publishers Weekly Top 100 Books of 2006
One of Booklist's Best Genre Fiction of 2006
One of the Chicago Tribune's best mystery/thrillers of 2006

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 decade's-old kidnappings and murders---and Inspector O discovers too late 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.

. . . an outstanding crime novel. . . . a not-to-be-missed reading experience.
---Library Journal (starred)

Inspector O is completely believable and sympathetic . . . The writing is superb, too . . . richly layered and visually evocative.
---Booklist (starred)

. . . an impressive debut that calls to mind such mystery thrillers as Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park. . . .
---Publishers Weekly (starred)