Reading "Bamboo and Blood," by James Church

I highly recommend it. James Church's Inspector O books are so good my head exploded three times yesterday alone. His latest is "The Man With the Baltic Stare," which was equally fantastic, and which I read last week. Here's the prologue to "Bamboo and Blood":

Each note was a bell hanging from its own brass hook, an infinity of them cleverly attached to the smooth and rounded edges of the sky. When streams froze, when branches on the trees were solemn and stiff, when every single thing was wrapped in the brutal hush of solitary survival, it was then her song would come to me from where she stood alone on the wooden bridge. No matter how wide I spread my arms, I could not hold the music of her voice. It echoed from the hills, and danced the icy stairways that led, at last, to the emptiness between the northern stars. Strange, what the senses do to each other-- how a raw wind against the skin makes the heart uneasy, how in the crystalline black of long nights, memories become voices close beside you. The Russians love to write about it. They think they are the only ones who know the cold.

The plots of Church's books are subtle and unpredictable, set in the odd, inscrutable culture of North Korea, where nothing is ever as it seems. Church, not the novelist's real name, has worked inside that sealed off country for decades and the books provide a rare glimpse into a world very few Westerners know much about. And the writing is perfect. Everyone should read James Church.