Word: pyongyang
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...Japan's pacifist constitution, and may move to do so this year. Normally, such a change would threaten to destabilize a region long wary of any resurgence of Japanese militarism. But Abe has worked hard to improve relations with his neighbors-a fact reflected in their muted reaction. While Pyongyang, predictably, took Tokyo to task for "converting the Japanese islands into a 'war state,'" the Chinese Foreign Ministry merely expressed hope that the change would not derail Japan's "peaceful development." "It's significant that China didn't really criticize it," says Hisahiko Okazaki, a foreign-policy adviser...
...over the U.S. Pacific Command just two months earlier, wasn't ruffled. His command - with 300,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines - still outclassed the force Beijing was building up, he insisted. And together with a growing South Korean army, it could quickly overpower any kind of attack by Pyongyang's army. "I'm not losing too much sleep right now," the admiral told TIME, which accompanied him on the trip...