Muir's gambit: a spy game novel - michael frost beckner

Charlie March is dead.

On a day that promised perfection to the hero of the CIA, an eighteen-minute countdown was all he got to enjoy it once he turned the ignition key and sent an electric spark to his sailboats engine.

With Muirs Gambit , Michael Frost Beckner returns to the world of Nathan Muir and Tom Bishop he created in the motion picture Spy Game .

A prequel to the film, Muirs Gambit opens forty-eight hours before the events of the Robert Redford/Brad Pitt film with the assassination of retired CIA hero Charlie March and spymaster Nathan Muirs life and career are about to implode.

Deputy Director Harker is exploiting Marchs assassination to rid the Agency of Muir-the Cold War dinosaur and life-long devotee of March whose brash style of espionage Harker despises.

For Nathan Muir, Charlie March was where everything started: March recruited him, trained him, forged him into a master spy.

But Nathan Muir were Charlie Marchs dying words, and Langley careerists find his murder the perfect opportunity to flush both Muir and their worst Cold War secrets down the CIA memory hole.

Told by the brilliant but hapless, manic but relentless Russell Aiken, this former Muir protégé is consigned to a dead-end career in Langleys legal department.

That is, until hes tasked with assassinating Muir himself.

Aiken approaches his spy game with both jaded sarcasm and secret yearning.

On the run from a crime of passion, Aiken sprints along the edges of madness through a world full of maddening corners.

As the two spies play a dangerous cat-and-mouse game over the dark underbelly of forty years of CIA conspiracies, Muirs Gambit sweeps from the Chosin Reservoir to Cyprus terror bombings, Congo coup détats, Angolan proxy wars, and in the final hours of the Berlin Wall.

And for two men untethered from morality, all those lies leave just one final night for redemption.