Just in case you’re wondering, we’ll be re-running some of our best and most popular book reviews every other week from now on.  They will be described as our Legacy Mysterious Book Reports.  Send us a quick request if you have a favorite that you’d like to see again and we’ll do our best to re-publish it.

Legacy Mysterious Book Report No. 38

The Korean Woman

Mysterious Book Report No. 386

by John Dwaine McKenna

Mi-Hi Abrahams is living the American dream.  She’s the mother of two children; a boy age five and a girl age two and a half, married to a Wall Street lawyer, and living a privileged, wealthy lifestyle on Manhattan’s upper east side where she’s a doting mommy and actively involved in the PTA and community charity events.  But it’s all a lie.  The woman’s real name is  Song Sun Young,  and she’s  a spy . . . what’s known as a  sleeper . . . for the NKPR, the North Korean People’s Republic in author John Altman’s electrifying new thriller: The Korean Woman, (Blackstone Publishing, $26.99, 261 pages, ISBN 978-1-4708-2697-0).

Song Sun Young barely managed to survive a brutal childhood in North Korea after her parents were killed, by engineering two escapes from the harshest imaginable prison camps before she turned eleven years old.  Instead of being shot, the authorities recognized her brains, beauty and talent and decided to utilize her abilities to advance the aims of the state.  She was plucked out of prison and began a decade long training course in spycraft.  With her younger brother still held by the regime as insurance, Song applied herself with diligence, efficiency and ruthlessness.  Showing no remorse after her first kill, she’s infiltrated into South Korea with a new identity, then into the United States under still another false identity.  There, she settles in, gets married, has kids . . . and waits . . . for the call she hopes never comes.  But just six years later, it does.  She’s tasked with stealing the inner workings of America’s financial system.

Unbeknownst to the North Koreans, the NSA, National Security Agency, using newly developed secret computers, has broken into the NKPR’s cyber systems.  The American CIA has been watching Song Sun Young for two years.  The covert team leader calls upon retired Israeli operative Dalia Artzi, (a character introduced in Altman’s last thriller, False Flag, MBR No. 322), who’s a world-class expert in the history and tactics of warfare and a professor at Princeton.  Her role is to figure out what the Koreans are attempting, as they observe Song’s behavior while she relentlessly goes about her mission.  What she sees convinces Dalia that Song is an unwitting dupe in a larger game, watching in horror as the nuclear-armed antagonists start their countdowns to the unthinkable in this teeth-gritting, pulse pounding and searing, all-too-real scenario that will leave you panting for more as Altman shows us once again, why he’s fast becoming one of the top thriller writers in the world!

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