War Women (2021) by Martin Limón
Good Reads meta-data is 214 pages, rated 3.18 by 96 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: South Korea.
Tagline: Women with guns!
Verdict: The dynamic duo return.
Having recently enjoyed a South Korean movie, I remembered this title was in the Kindle reading bank so I turned to it to continue my mental travels in Korea.
Sergeants George Sueño and Ernie Bascom are at it again. Ernie is tall and looks very aryan, while George is even taller and looks very hispanic dark. They often play on this contrast as bad cop Ernie and worse cop George. Since they have served in this fictional South Korea well beyond the decade of the 1980s, George has had time to learn a lot of Korean, and treats the natives with consideration and respect. Ernie accepts his leadership on this front…when he is sober. Since they are cops, GIs shun them, leaving them to spend most of their time off- and as well on-duty together.
In this outing one of their prime snitches has gone missing, a Sergeant First Class aiming at the twenty-year pension who manages the classified files, filing system, and archives — the last man to go AWOL. In the past he has passed over useful intel to them for a price. Ergo his absence is more than just an official problem, it jeopardises their own capacity to stay on the good side of the Head Shed wherein sit the brass (sometimes on tacks).
The plot concerns the rape of women by American soldiers and is even more unpleasant to read in the book than in this line. Ah, most readers probably supposed the women in the previous sentence to be Korean. Not so, The victims are members of 877th Field Transportation Company, drivers and loaders who cart around boy toys. Yes, these are women, because the volunteer Army has to take whom it can get, and that riles pea-brains high and low, including brass in that Head Shed in Seoul whose widely repeated off the record remarks about what women are good for have been interpreted by a few sergeants on field manoeuvres as the license to rape. Everyone knows that in the Eighth Army to lodge a complaint about being raped, or anything else, is more likely to lead to punishment for the reporter than the perpetrator, as in most corporations. After all, there was no problem until the report created it.
Instead the women have turned vigilante on the same assumption, that for the C.O. to report their mutiny would be a stain on his record, one big enough to lose his pension. Having no North Koreans to shoot at, the Americans, men and women, trade gunfire. It may sound far fetched but the writer make it credible, nearly.
All of this is aided and abetted by that recurring intrepid journalist, Katie Bird, who puts plenty of cats among the Army pigeons. She is always a welcome addition to any party with a razor wit and never take no for an answer attitude. She is always two or three steps ahead of Bascom and Sueno and stays there as they follow in her wake.
The to-ing and fro-ing in Seoul is detailed, and in this instance there seems to this reader to be too much of that to disguise the rickety, if distasteful, plot. North Koreans are in the formula as usual.
The series started in 1992 with Jade Lady Burning and this is #17 recounting law enforcement (sort of) in the Eighth Army during its occupation of South Korea in the 1980s. At the time South Korea was a military dictatorship of an unpleasant type, and still impoverished with the constant threat from the north.