Martin Limón's The Ville Rat opens in 1974, with the body of a strangled Korean woman wearing a traditional chima-jeogori found on the shore of the Sonyu River in South Korea. Sergeants George Sueño and Ernie Bascom from the U.S. 8th Army Criminal Investigation Division in Seoul are called to the scene. They discover that the case is under the jurisdiction of the army's 2nd Infantry Division military police, which controls the area.
But the 8th Army's provost marshal assigns Sueño and Bascom another case--involving a black soldier shooting a white officer--that gives them a legitimate reason to be in the area. While investigating the soldier's motivation, the duo continues following clues in the Korean woman's murder, leading them to a blind calligrapher and an American civilian, who is possibly a former member of the army and known as the Ville Rat. The investigators soon realize they've uncovered decades-old corruption, and powerful people will pay to have them stopped--permanently.
Sueño and Bascom, in their 10th series outing, are a good team, with Sueño's calm, bookish demeanor balancing out Bascom's hotheaded tendencies. Sometimes Sueño has to guide his partner toward a logical conclusion, while Bascom is usually the first to take decisive action when the two are in trouble. The villain would be more arresting if the motivation for his cruelty had been explored further, but The Ville Rat, set 40 years ago, provides insight into tensions and conflicts--racial and otherwise--in the military and society as a whole that are still relevant today. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd