Play the Red Queen
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The posthumous masterwork by critically acclaimed author, storied publisher, and Viet Nam veteran Juris Jurjevics—the story of two American GI cops caught in the corrupt cauldron of a Vietnamese civil war stoked red hot by revolution.
Viet Nam, 1963. A female Viet Cong assassin is trawling the boulevards of Saigon, catching US Army officers off-guard with a single pistol shot, then riding off on the back of a scooter. Although the US military is not officially in combat, sixteen thousand American servicemen are stationed in Viet Nam “advising” the military and government. Among them are Ellsworth Miser and Clovis Robeson, two army investigators who have been tasked with tracking down the daring killer.
Set in the besieged capital of a new nation on the eve of the coup that would bring down the Diem regime and launch the Americans into the Viet Nam War, Play the Red Queen is Juris Jurjevics’s capstone contribution to a lifelong literary legacy: a tour-de-force mystery-c*m-social history, breathtakingly atmospheric and heartbreakingly alive with the laws and lawlessness of war.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this outstanding mystery set in 1963 Saigon from the late Jurjevics (Red Flags), two agents for the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division, sergeants Ellsworth Miser and Clovis Robeson, have the daunting task of stopping an assassin known as the Red Queen, who leaves a "playing card bearing a red female figure" at the scene of her crimes. Maj. James Furth, her third victim in less than two weeks, is shot through the heart at an outdoor cafe. The shooter, according to a witness, was an attractive Vietnamese woman of about 20 on a motorbike. One of the playing cards is found nearby. The woman's murderous campaign opens a new front in the conflict, as Saigon has been a mostly safe city for Americans. Miser and Robeson's boss, Captain Deckle, reveals that a Vietcong deserter has reported that the Red Queen has an additional objective beyond taking out seemingly random targets the "liquidation of a major player." Jurjevics, the publisher and cofounder of Soho Press, maintains a page-turning pace and captures the tense atmosphere of the time and place with evocative prose. This is a tour-de-force that will make fans of Martin Lim n and James Benn sorry that there will be no more from this gifted writer, who died in 2018.
