Pyongyang Confidential

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...