cover image The Pachinko Woman

The Pachinko Woman

Henry Mynton, Francis Ingoldesy. William Morrow & Company, $25 (400pp) ISBN 978-0-688-16170-5

Intent on bringing democracy to North Korea, Korean-American beauty Helim Kim plots to disable one of North Korea's major sources of revenue--the pachinko gambling industry in Japan--in this muddled thriller of international intrigue. Largely owned by North Koreans, the pachinko parlors funnel billions of dollars a year in laundered money back to the homeland. Kim's plan is to convince the Japanese government to make pachinko parlors public companies, thereby subjecting them to strict accounting practices that would put an end to the financial chicanery. In carrying out her plan, however, the ""pachinko woman"" stumbles into a hornet's nest of villains, all of whom seem to be engaged in much more nefarious business than simple money laundering. They include an East German killer hired by the Russians to knock off pachinko parlor owners as part of a complicated effort to gain an economic foothold in Asia; a duplicitous North Korean dissident who wants to overthrow his country's government so he can become dictator; FBI spies obsessed with nuclear secrets; and a corrupt Japanese politician scheming to become prime minister. While Kim falls under the influence of these various miscreants at several points during her quest, her American boyfriend, wide-eyed lawyer Steve Juric, and a dogged Japanese cop, Tetsuo Mori, try to sort out who's responsible for all the deadly attention. This debut effort by Mynton (a pseudonym for ""an American who has lived in the Far East for more than 35 years"") has moments of compelling action and flashes of character depth. But they are squeezed into an otherwise ponderous, tangled plot in which so many story lines are at work that the narrative has no central core. The crudely handled epilogue attempts to answer several complex questions with only the briefest of explanations, but the reader will be grateful for the elucidation, however sketchy. Agent, Jed Mattes. (Nov.)