
Bamboo and Blood
The Inspector O Novels, Book 3
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Narrated by:
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Feodor Chin
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By:
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James Church
About this listen
The critically acclaimed A Corpse in the Koryo brought readers into the enigmatic workings of North Korean intelligence with the introduction of a new kind of detective—the mysterious Inspector O. In the follow-up, Hidden Moon, O threaded his way through the minefield of North Korean ministries into a larger conspiracy he was never supposed to touch.
Now the inspector returns.
In the winter of 1997, trying to stay alive during a famine that has devastated much of North Korea, Inspector O is ordered to play host to an Israeli agent who appears in Pyongyang. When the wife of a North Korean diplomat in Pakistan dies under suspicious circumstances, O is told to investigate—but with a curious proviso: Don’t look too closely at the details, and stay away from the question of missiles. O knows he can’t avoid uncovering what he is supposed to ignore on a trail that leads him from the dark, chilly rooms of Pyongyang to an abandoned secret facility deep in the countryside, guarded by a lonely general, and from the streets of New York to a bench beneath a horse chestnut tree on the shores of Lake Geneva, where the Inspector discovers he is up to his ears in missiles—and worse. Stalked by the past and wary of the future, O is convinced there is no one he can trust and no one he can’t suspect. Swiss intelligence wants him out of the country; someone else wants him dead.
Once again, James Church’s spare, lyrical prose guides listeners through an unfamiliar landscape of whispered words and shadows, a world wrapped in a level of mystery and complexity that few outsiders have experienced. With Inspector O, noir has a new home in North Korea, and James Church holds the keys.
©2008 James Church (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Sit on a quiet hillside at dawn among the wildflowers; take a picture of a car coming up a deserted highway from the south. Simple orders for Inspector O, until he realizes they have led him far, far off his department’s turf and into a maelstrom of betrayal and death. North Korea’s leaders are desperate to hunt down and eliminate anyone who knows too much about a series of decades-old kidnappings and murders—and Inspector O discovers too late that he has been sent into the chaos.
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-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sit on a quiet hillside at dawn among the wildflowers; take a picture of a car coming up a deserted highway from the south. Simple orders for Inspector O, until he realizes they have led him far, far off his department’s turf and into a maelstrom of betrayal and death. North Korea’s leaders are desperate to hunt down and eliminate anyone who knows too much about a series of decades-old kidnappings and murders—and Inspector O discovers too late that he has been sent into the chaos.
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Raymond Chandler meets Franz Kafka in N. Korea
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By: James Church
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- By: Matthew Richardson
- Narrated by: Leighton Pugh, Lucy Scott
- Length: 14 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Only she knows the truth. Only he can tell the world. Vienna, 1946. A brilliant German scientist spirited out of the ruins Nazi Europe in search of a new life. Moscow, 1964. A rising star of the British diplomatic service whose job is not what it seems. London, the present day. A once promising academic offered an opportunity to seal his place in history. Their stories, their lives, and the fate of the world, are bound by a single document: The Scarlet Papers. The devastating secrets contained within teased by a brief invitation: Tomorrow 11AM. Take a cab and pay in cash. Tell no one.
-
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- By: Matthew Richardson
- Narrated by: Colin Mace
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- Unabridged
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Overall
-
Performance
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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-
-
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By: Martin Limon
-
The Kill Artist
- By: Daniel Silva
- Narrated by: George Guidall
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- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After the assassination of his wife and son, Gabriel Allon retires from his brutal anti-terrorist career and loses himself in his previous cover job: art restoration. But when Tariq al-Hourani, the Palestinian terrorist responsible for his family’s death, begins a killing spree designed to destroy Middle East peace talks, Gabriel once again slips into the shadowy world of international intrigue. In a global game of hide-and-seek, the motives of Gabriel and Tariq soon become more personal than political.
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Critic reviews
What listeners say about Bamboo and Blood
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- itinerant
- 04-22-18
Chandler-esque
This book was very good, on the line-by-line level: it reads like it was written by Chandler, and it's read by someone who knows how to interpret that, yet with an Asian flair. The story, though . . . I never really figured out what this book was actually about. Chandler famously had the McGuffin . . . this book seems more like the travelogue of a North Korean who similarly never really knows what's going on. It's a very interesting and well-told and amusing travelogue, with all kinds of vague skulduggery going on, but really . . . what is at stake?
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Darwin8u
- 05-21-13
Hard-Boiled, Koryŏ Noir Flop
James Church's third Inspector O novel just doesn't quite deliver the goods. It starts out fine, blending hard-boiled noir (Hammett/Chandler) with international political thriller (le Carré/Steinhauer) mixed with a bit/dash of Hemingway.
Where Hemingway was fixated on food, wine and women, Church fixates on lack of food, the cold and wood. It all works, if you can ignore the sloppy pacing that creeps into the end of the novel. The novel's first 3/4 seems fine, not exceptional, but interesting and not too overdone, but with about 70 pages left it seems like Church loses all interest in the project and decides it will take entirely too much time and work to weave the various narrative threads back, so he just leaves them, or cuts them off completely.
The end of the novel reminded me of the butchered Geneva plane trees that Inspector O was so upset by. It is hard to love something that hasn't been allowed to freely grow to its potential. As Inspector O says of the plane trees, "They might wish they were dead. No, they have been mangled. Their tops have been hacked off. They are maimed."
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15 people found this helpful