Play the Red Queen

Starred review from February 24, 2020
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 Limón and James Benn sorry that there will be no more from this gifted writer, who died in 2018. Agent: Anne-Lise Spitzer, Phillip Spitzer Agency.

February 15, 2020
In 1963, American troops in Vietnam were still playing the role of "advisors," saddled with the task of getting "Buddhist troops fired up about battling Communists on behalf of their abusive and unloved Catholic government." So it is for Ellsworth Miser and Clovis Robeson, army MPs in Saigon, until they find themselves with an assignment even more thankless than advising South Vietnamese soldiers who don't want advice. A motor-scooter-riding sharpshooter, nicknamed the Red Queen, has been killing random American soldiers on the streets of Saigon with a single pistol shot. Intel suggests she's ready to up her game, targeting either corrupt Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem or American ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. Miser and Robeson are to find and eliminate the Red Queen before that happens. The late Jurjevics, who was cofounder and publisher of Soho Press, was also a Vietnam vet and a talented novelist. His posthumously published third book, following another Vietnam-set thriller, Red Flags (2011), effectively re-creates the tangled politics at work as the U.S. slouched its way into war, and ordinary soldiers were learning that cynicism was necessary to survival.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)