While down at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, I overheard the proprietor recommending this book to another customer who sought books by local authors. So I grabbed a copy for myself. This isn’t a bad book, but it’s not a great book either.
The primary problem with the book is that it uses quite a few of the mystery clichés out there. Superior warns the investigators not to work on a case, but they do anyway. Investigators take short-cuts because they don’t want to go through proper channels. Bad guy starts the whole thing off by with an improbably attempt to get the investigators involved by framing them in the conspiracy. Investigators try to hide their involvement rather than come clean. Sitcom-like misunderstandings where each person things the other person did something.
The good part is that there are two new cultures in the book (Soho likes international mysteries), the Korean culture and the military culture. The Korean culture isn’t as deeply intertwined in this as the communist Chinese society is in Qiu Xiaolong’s books, but you do get a good taste.
The stars are Army C.I.D. investigators. A prostitute pays them to pass along a note to a British soldier who shortly thereafter ends up dead. Their investigation leads them to the slicky boys
, a criminal gang that steals from the armed forces and sells their wares on the black market. It’s incredibly well-organized and the theory is that they’ve killed the soldier because he was free-lancing with his own army thievery. The slicky boys don’t want the attention and so they kill him. Which doesn’t make much sense cause that would just bring more attention to them. Soon it becomes clear that there is yet another player in the game, an A.W.O.L. Navy S.E.A.L. who is also stealing.
Not a bad book overall but the use of lots of clichés tags this solidly in the first novel
category for me.
Title: Slicky boys
Author: Martin Limón
Imprint / publisher: Soho
Format: Paperback
Length: 387 p.
Publication date: September 2004
ISBN-10: 1-56947-385-4
Subject: Americans — Korea — Fiction
Subject: Military intelligence — Fiction
Subject: Black market — Fiction
Subject: Seoul (Korea) — Fiction
LC classification: PS3562.I465 S58 1997
