Martin Limon joined the Army at 17 and stayed in it for 20 years. Ten of those were in South Korea. In 1986, he was transferred back to the States to serve as a recruiter. That's when he started to write.

In 1992, Soho Press published "Jade Lady Burning," the first of Limon's police procedurals featuring Ernie Bascom and George Sueno, agents for the 8th U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) in Seoul. "The Door to Bitterness" is the fourth and latest in the series.

The books are set in the 1970s, when South Korea was governed by generals and only beginning to recover from the ravages of the Korean War — not the country you see in travel posters.

Take his description of the Yellow House, which isn't a house at all, but some 15 to 20 acres set aside just outside the port of Inchon "specifically for the entertainment of foreign sailors" and "jammed with brothels." GIs are more than welcome:

"American GIs are the only men who have something in common with the girls who work the Yellow House: they're young, naive, caught in a world not of their own choosing, and quickly finding out, sometimes painfully, what life's struggle is about. GIs are for the most part clean and healthy, and they have more disposable income than the merchant marines. Most important of all, some GIs are young enough and foolish enough that they just might take one of the Yellow House girls away from all this. It's happened before, plenty of times."

In "The Door to Bitterness," a casino has been robbed, and a woman dealer shot and critically injured. The thieves bluffed their way onto the premises by flashing a CID badge. The gun was a .45 semi-automatic. Both badge and gun were Sueno's.

Sueno, of course, knew something like this was bound to happen — as soon as he woke up in that alley with his head battered and bloody and his wallet, badge and weapon missing.

Bascom and Sueno follow the evidence down alleys and corridors tourists never see. Limon has the military lingo and ambience down. Plot, pacing and plausibility are just about perfect. Limon also has a lyrical turn of phrase: "The morning was wonderfully cool and overcast, and in the open-topped Jeep, as we sped north on the two-lane highway, a line of crystal blue hovered above brown rice paddies. Layered atop the line was a ceiling of churning gray clouds." That's a cut or two above what you usually find in a book like this.