Pyongyang Confidential

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The story of contemporary North Korea is almost universally told as the tale of one man: Kim Jong Il, the all-powerful dictator whose idiosyncrasies and erratic behavior overshadow the more mundane lives of his 23 million subjects. So it's a bit of a surprise to realize that Kim's name isn't mentioned at all in the 280 pages of James Church's impressive North Korean thriller, A Corpse in the Koryo. The dictator and his father, North Korea's founder Kim Il Sung, are in passing alluded to as "our great Leaders", but to Inspector O, a gruff cop from the Ministry of People's Security, they have all the influence of distant planets.

Inspector O has a simple mission: sit on a hill at dawn and photograph a car traveling the long, ruler-straight road connecting Pyongyang with the border to the South. But this is North Korea, where even the easiest task is complicated by penury—the camera he is given has a dead battery—and fraught with politics. Returning to the capital, O is unexpectedly grilled by two senior intelligence officials with a keen interest in the car he didn't photograph. Becoming embroiled with the secret services is a dangerous proposition for any North Korean, even a policeman, so O is sent away from the capital by his long-suffering boss, Chief Inspector Pak, until the heat is off. As in all good mysteries, what looks like a reprieve turns out to be even more trouble. While supposedly lying low, O stumbles across a bloody turf war between two rival intelligence departments over a lawless border town and into the arms of Elena, a Finnish-Chinese femme fatale.

Church—the nom de plume of a former Western intelligence official who, in an e-mail interview with TIME, says he has been "in, around, and over (but never below) North Korea many times"—has an excellent eye for detail and a flair for the high art of gumshoe deadpan. "I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see who it was," O narrates, before being knocked cold by a security goon. "We'd been trained never to make that mistake; I made it anyway." As a detective, O is as hard-boiled as they come, a barely subordinate loner with a disdain for the pins of the Leaders that every North Korean is expected to wear and a woodworking hobby that threatens to earn him an "antisocial" note in his file. ("Why the hell can't you just smoke, like everyone else?" the Chief Inspector complains.) But O gets results, and when the body of a Western diplomat is discovered in a room at Pyongyang's biggest hotel—the stiff in the book's title—he is quickly called back to the capital to investigate, only to find his life even more imperiled there than at the border.

Inspector O's story is told in a series of vivid flashbacks, related to an Irish intelligence officer during a cat-and-mouse encounter in Prague. Their vignettes make a compelling side narrative to the main tale, but the best feature of the book is how it builds, brick by dirty gray brick, a portrait of North Korean society that feels far more real than any debriefing. Church's Pyongyang is caught in the familiar time warp of the North's long-soured revolution: it's a place of deserted roads, decaying buildings and rusting trains that creak off to the provinces at walking pace. But what's different is the richly quotidian existence he brings to life. O may be under the thumb of a totalitarian regime, but he meets associates for a beer after work, flirts with telephone operators and fends off the elderly widows in his apartment building who want to hitch him to a suitable bride. Just as Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko detective novels stripped the cold war thriller of much of its ideological baggage, A Corpse in the Koryo is, in many ways, a street-level look at life in the Hermit Kingdom with nary a mention of mass games or nuclear weapons. "Anyone bold enough to try to discuss the North in nonjudgmental terms inevitably has felt the need to first establish a protective bubble of morally clean credentials [by uttering] something like, 'I think that North Korea is the worst regime on earth,'" Church says. "Characters in a mystery don't have to do any such thing."

For all its originality and beguiling observation, A Corpse in the Koryo has the air of having been finished in a hurry. Inspector O's measured voice carries the story superbly up to its breathless climax, but in the end, some parts of the puzzle fit too neatly together while others don't fit at all. Major characters also disappear suddenly from the scene and with barely any reason. Church excuses this as art imitating life, explaining: "If you deal with the place, (and more to the point, if you live in the place) you learn to accept a great deal of uncertainty, unresolved problems [and] unfinished thoughts." Most frustratingly, we never get to hear the story of how O manages to escape his own tale's bullet-riddled climax. That, we can only hope, is fodder for another book. Church says there's a second in the works: in Inspector O, the author has crafted a complex character with rough charm to spare, and in eternally static North Korea, he has a setting that will fascinate readers for sequels to come.