A Bitter Truth by Charles Todd

This is the third book in the Bess Crawford mystery series. I hadn't read the two previous books but this one stands alone quite well. Bess is a nurse stationed in France during WWI and has returned home to London for a brief leave. She finds a woman huddled in the cold on her porch, apparently injured, and takes her in. She agrees to the woman's request to accompany her home, worried that she has a concussion. At the large country home, Bess meets the rest of the family, discovers a murder, and is caught up in the solving of it. My early reaction was annoyance that Bess would get so caught up with a complete stranger's family that she would postpone her trip to see her parents at Christmas, lie to the police to protect family secrets, even to the point of briefly incriminating herself. But once I got past that, I did get caught up in the story. Todd (the nom-de-plume of a mother-son writing team) does a good job of creating the feel of the place and time. The characters are fleshed out enough for the purposes of the story and the mystery has a satisfying resolution. I would certainly consider reading the first two books.

The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson

This is one of those stories that stays with you after you've finished reading it. It left me speechless, struggling to define my reactions to it. It is a powerful, disturbing and very satisfying book.
Set in North Korea, a place I know little about beyond what I've picked up in the news, Johnson does a good job of creating the day to day life there, a place where individuals exist only to support the collective whole, a society shaped by years of despotic rule by a psychopath. The first half of the book is narrated by Pak Jun do, who grew up in an orphan's work house run by his father. Pak had control over where orphans were sent to work, knowing some factories were death sentences. This gave him an early education on how power worked there. As an adult, he worked as a kidnapper, snatching people from South Korea that Kim Jong Il has targeted, and later working on a ship listening to foreign broadcasts. He learns something of the outside world and begins to explore the idea of freedom. He starts on a path that is the center of the novel.
The second half of the book is narrated by 'the Biographer', a torturer who justifies his trade to himself by writing a biography of each of his victims. His story, and that of Pak, are intertwined and Johnson moves between their stories and back and forth in time with a clear hand.
The stories about Kim Jon Il are fantastic but based on true events. It is hard to believe one man could be responsible for so much suffering. The author does a good job of describing how societies can be made to do almost anything through fear and loss of control. I strongly suggest this as a must read.