Teresa Reviews Body in the Library (2018)

Teresa reviews Body in the Library (2018) and found that, in the run up to the end of the series, she doesn’t mind the changes they made to the story.

(Ms. Ma: Nemesis episodes 25-28)

(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel

Agatha adjacent: 2 stranglers
The key players in Body show up with the same motives but nothing more.

Quality of episodes: 4 stranglers
Body’s plot is updated nicely to suit contemporary Korea but otherwise ignored. Unless you’re a purist, you won’t mind.

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.

The Body in the Library’s plot is there, but it’s not given much attention. Conway Jefferson becomes CEO Shin Hyurr-Jo who got rich loaning money. His son and daughter died tragically, and he keeps his daughter-in-law and son-in-law close. I don’t think his unnamed daughter-in-law got a single line of dialog. Nor does she have a son by a previous marriage.

Son-in-law Kye Soo-Gil (Mark Gaskell) becomes a local pop star manager and owns a bar hosting young, up-and-coming K-pop groups. Thus, the stage is set for his father-in-law to become entranced by Kim Bo-Ra, a bright new star on the firmament. Kim Bo-Ra is managed by her aunt, Lee Seo-Won, who — judging from a scene in a dance studio — is always looking for talent. I’m unsure if Lee Seo-Won and Kye Soo-Gil are secretly married or even romantically entangled. But they worked together to murder Kim Bo-Ra (she’s only talked about and never appears so you don’t see her performance). To cover up this murder, they also murder a student who resembles Kim Bo-Ra.

New Rainbow Village resident, Ha Eun-Jik (Basil Blake), is an annoying, avant-garde musician.

When, after another drunken binge at Kye Soo-Gil’s bar, he finds a strangled body in his house, he saves himself and annoys Chief Jo by dumping the body at the police station. This student, Seong Hae-In, gets about two lines of dialog. When her body, complete with heavily sequined outfit, bleached blonde hair, and bitten red fingernails, is discovered, it sends shockwaves throughout Rainbow Village. She is, as you’d expect, identified by a distraught Lee Seo-Won as being her missing niece, Kim Bo-Ra. Otherwise, you learn nothing about her or her family.

Ms. Ma does the Poirot in the morgue with the fake Kim Bo-Ra’s body under the sheet. She’s got everyone there, including CEO Shin Hyurr-Jo who identifies the body as not being his protégé but some girl he never saw before. When confronted, Kye Soo-Gil tells his father-in-law that the murders wouldn’t have happened if he’d been given half a million won instead of that wannabe K-pop superstar.

That’s all you’ll get of the novel. But you won’t care because so much else happens! From the opening moments, you see the evil plot to get rid of Ms. Ma, allowing her husband, Jang Chul-Min, to take control of her company, their beloved daughter, and all that lovely, lovely money.

But he isn’t the mastermind. It’s his accomplice, Prosecutor Yang Mi-Hee. She’s smarter than Jang Chul-Min and far more ruthless. She arranged the kidnapping of Eun-Ji’s little sister, murdered Eun-Ji’s little sister, and murdered Novelist Ma in episode 24.

Yang Mi-Hee dominates that partnership. She tells him what to do. Based on hints in the story, she’s extremely well-connected to the criminal world. She found the kidnapper who turns out to be Jang Il-Koo’s estranged son. Afterwards, when he’s chortling over his reward, she has a different set of henchmen beat him into a coma. As a prosecuting attorney, she knows the value of removing potential witnesses. She’s not wrong about tying up loose ends, either. The kidnapper spots Jang Chul-Min and contemplates blackmail to earn more money. Moreover, it looks like she’s the one who hired the thugs who menaced Lee Jung-Hee.

Yang Mi-Hee has a master plan beyond helping Jang Chul-Min escape his hated wife. Are they lovers? It’s unclear, but he fears his possible future with that harridan. Yang Mi-Hee doesn’t just order Jang Chul-Min about. She refuses to tell him what happened to his daughter, Jang Min-Seo. We still don’t know if Min-Seo is alive. Having seen Yang Mi-Hee in action, I wouldn’t put it past her to have murdered Min-Seo, too.

Wait. Master plan. Right! Yang Mi-Hee’s master plan which Eun-Ji somehow uncovered (mad computer hacking skills, I guess) and passed along to Inspector Han is to use the power of her office as prosecuting attorney to force companies into bankruptcy so Jang Chul-Min’s company can acquire them. In addition, she might be laundering money for gangsters. Who is she related to? Where did she come from? We don’t know, yet, but I hope we find out. I kinda doubt that Korean mobsters would take orders from any woman who isn’t very high in the hierarchy.

She is utterly ruthless. The minute Jang Chul-Min grows a spine and objects, he’ll be on his back while she bashes his face in with a rock.

While Yang Mi-Hee’s master plan is unveiled, Inspector Han starts down the breadcrumb trail provided by Eun-Ji and his own smarts. There’s a lovely scene in a seedy café where he explains how the car switching was worked during the ransom payoff (a point of evidence against Ms. Ma was that her car was smeared with her daughter’s blood), although they didn’t explain how Ms. Ma was able to use the same ignition key in both cars.

Meanwhile, back in Rainbow Village, Ms. Ma is distracted by her fears over Choi Woo-Joon. He’s exactly the age Min-Seo was when she disappeared. She wants to love him, but she doesn’t dare. But when he runs away, she realizes how much she needs him. He has reopened her heart, along with Eun-Ji’s and Ko Mal-Koo’s hearts. They’re becoming a little family, even referring to Jang Il-Koo as grandpa.

Since she’s preoccupied, she doesn’t pay much attention to Chief Jo’s becoming suspect number one in the murder of that K-pop wannabe. She’s arguing with Eun-Ji over how complicit her husband is in Min-Seo’s disappearance and the murder. Ms. Ma just can’t accept that her ex had anything to do with Min-Seo’s abduction. She knows how much he loved their daughter.

Which brings us back to The Body in the Library. Ms. Ma gets roped into figuring out the case. When she reveals that Lee Seo-Won lied about niece Kim Bo-Ra’s identity and had an accomplice to make the alibi work, she suddenly realizes that Eun-Ji was correct. Her husband, whom she relied on to safeguard their daughter, had lied in the morgue just like Lee Seo-Won did and he worked with an accomplice.

She agrees to meet Inspector Han to compare notes about what each knows. But on the way back, Yang Mi-Hee’s true reach is revealed. Remember, she’s a prosecuting attorney. She knows all about evidence and witnesses. She’s got a very good idea what would happen to her, a trusted authority figure in the Korean Justice Department, if it were revealed she’d helped her lover and co-conspirator kidnap and murder little girls, have prisoners killed, and defraud companies to become even richer.

And thus, in the climax of episode 28, Yang Mi-Hee proves, once and for all, that she’ll murder anyone who stands in her way.