G.I. Bones
Martin Limon
Soho, Nov 2009, $24.00
ISBN: 9781569476031
Korean fortuneteller Aunti Mee insists The Wandering Ghost of Tech Sergeant Florencio R. Moretti will not leave her alone. The GI went missing two decades ago back in 1953. U.S. 8th Army Criminal Investigation Detachment investigators Sergeants George Sueno and Ernie Bascom are assigned to investigate what everyone in CID including them assumes is a corpse.
The two military cops enter the Itaewon red light sector of Seoul seeking clues that will lead to Moretti’s remains so he can be properly buried back in the States. The pair also searches for a missing military teenage dependent of whom they assume is a runaway. Neither expected they would face the wrath of the Seven Dragons gang who own the district; both expected the wrath of superiors who want Moretti’s bones to remain interred wherever they are.
This is a super historical military police procedure that brings to life 1970s Seoul and to a degree how Koreans and soldiers of that era looked back to the end of the Korean Conflict. The mysteries of the missing dependent and the murder of Moretti are excellent, but it is the historiographer’s delight of time and place that make G.I. BONES and the series a winner.
Harriet Klausner
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