"Kimchi Kitty," by Martin Limón, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, March/April 2023.
This is the seventh story by Limón to make it onto my list.
His work reminds me of the TV show MASH. Both involve the U.S. military and Korea, of course, but I am thinking of an odder coincidence. The cast of that show spent, I think, eleven years portraying a war that lasted just over three.
Limón's characters have filled more than a dozen novels and many short stories in South Korea without ever escaping from the early 1970s.
George Sueño and Ernie Bascom are CID officers, U.S. Army detectives and their stories are police procedurals, showing in meticulous detail how they track down bad guys in Seoul and other points. The stories are believable, nuanced, and fascinating.
In this one our heroes are chasing a mugger, probably an American serviceman, who is attacking GIs and getting more violent with each attack. Sueño guesses that he is obsessed with Kimchi Kitty, a Korean national who sings in a country band.
The cops hope to use her as bait to catch the bad guy before things get even worse. But Kitty, frightened as she is, turns out to have more agency than expected...
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