A lot of people get killed in "The Corpse in the Koryo," and nobody seems to miss them.
"Inspector O," a North Korean cop, walks a tightrope as he investigates a series of cases while grappling with the contradictions of his isolated neo-Stalinist world. This original work has evoked comparisons with Martin Cruz Smith's 1980 best-seller "Gorky Park," but in terms of its moody milieu, "Koryo" -- named for the Pyongyang hotel where a foreigner is found dead -- may more closely resemble British author Philip Kerr's "Berlin Noir" novels set in Germany during the Nazi years.
The protagonist, merely by engaging in independent thought, is transformed into the hunter who becomes the hunted, a sort of North Korean version of Orwell's Winston Smith.