Word: inspector
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...three aides to help with the inquiry and waited five days before finally calling in the FBI. In failing to secure North's files, Meese may have given the former NSC official the opportunity to destroy important documents. Said a Justice Department official: "It was a performance by Inspector Clouseau." Meese's defenders reply that the Attorney General is not getting credit for exposing the highly complex and well-hidden money transfers in the first place. Says Assistant Attorney General Stephen Trott: "Ed Meese deserves a medal...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...