The Wandering Ghost

September 3, 2007
The turbulent Korean peninsula provides the backdrop to this fine military mystery, the fifth (after 2005's The Door to Bitterness
) to feature U.S. Army criminal investigation agents George Sueño and Ernie Bascom. A crack combat unit stationed near the strife-torn demilitarized zone proves strangely uncooperative when a military policewoman disappears. The missing soldier had made herself unpopular with her chain of command when she attempted to testify against two GIs who accidentally killed a Korean schoolgirl while speeding. As Sueño and Bascom dig past the obfuscation, they uncover an unsavory mix of black marketeering, sexual harassment, corruption, rape and murder, risking disgrace in their quest to find their fellow cop before it's too late. Limón, a veteran who spent 10 years stationed in the Republic of Korea, captures precisely the experience and atmosphere of the tension that exists between the American military and South Korean society, two vastly different worlds bound together only by realpolitik.

Starred review from September 1, 2007
After the only female military police officer assigned to a U.S. base in the Korean DMZ disappears and another officer dies in what is ruled an accident, Eighth Army cops Ernie Bascom and George Sueño ("The Door to Bitterness") are sent from army headquarters in Seoul to investigate. But someone tries to kill them, and the officers in charge of C Division are sabotaging all efforts to find the missing soldier. Setting the standard for military crime fiction, Limón's compelling stories of murder, greed, and abuse of power are set off by the Korean culture and the 1970s atmosphere. [See Prepub Mystery, "LJ" 7/07; for another view of Korea, see the review of James Church's "Hidden Moon", p. 112.Ed.]

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2007
In their fifth outing, agents George Sueno and Ernie Bascom, of the Eighth Army Criminal Investigations Division in Seoul, Korea, are sent to Camp Casey, on Koreas Demilitarized Zone. Their assignment: find a female MPthe second Divisions first female MPwho has gone missing. What they immediately find is palpable hostility to their presence and evidence that criminal activities abound at Camp Casey: sexual harassment of female soldiers, black marketeering, and possibly murder. With an investigative technique that is as subtle as frontal assault, mayhem ensues, again and again, with Sueno and Bascom barely escaping death each time. The great strength of this novel is the authors painfully and chillingly plausible portrait of Korea and the U.S. army. Korea is portrayed as beautiful but poor and dependent on U.S. dollars and military protection. The army is shown to be an arrogant bureaucracy largely contemptuous of Korea and its people. Fans of crime and military fiction may find this an eye-opener.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)