Today’s my stop on the Random Things blog tour for Play the Red Queen by Juris Jurjevics. Thanks to the author and Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for a chance to feature this!
Play the Red Queen by Juris Jurjevics
Genre: Historical crime/mystery
Publication: No Exit Press, November 2020
Vietnam, 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 Vietnam ‘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 Vietnam War, Play the Red Queen is a tour-de-force mystery-cum-social history, breathtakingly atmospheric and heartbreakingly alive with the laws and lawlessness of war.
Read advance praise of Play the Red Queen
‘Steamy and atmospheric… a great gift of a novel’ – Dan Fesperman, author of Safe Houses
‘Jurjevics brings the heat, the smells and the corruption vividly to life… masterfully pulled together’- Sara Paretsky, author of Dead Land
‘Juris Jurjevics has brilliantly accomplished the seamless combining of a genre form with the deep resonance of literary art’ – Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
Read an excerpt:
Chapter 2 – Extract
Trucks, sedans, and overloaded buses rolled past the newly dead body at speed. Among the mass of vehicles jamming the boulevard rode women on bicycles, scooters, and the benches of pedal rickshaws, their long hair trailing behind them. Most of the younger ones were dressed just like the Red Queen in white ao dais and woven cone hats, their eyes flitting over us from beneath black bangs. The gauzy silk tunics billowed as the women floated by. The street cops’ white uniforms blazed as they went through the motions of searching for the expended shell casing among the automobiles and motorbikes darting around them like spooked fish. They weren’t exactly busting ass, but you could hardly blame them. There was no mystery as to who had killed the major or why. It’s what we did – hostiles and friendlies. It’s what we were there to do to each other. Any so-called evidence wasn’t going to tell you much more than that. This wasn’t a crime of passion or common murder. It was a skilled assassination, a stranger coming upon a stranger and cutting him down. Nothing personal.
Read other reviews from the tour!
About Juris Jurjevics
Juris Jurjevics (1943-2018) was born in Latvia and grew up in Displaced Persons camps in Germany before emigrating to the United States. He served in Vietnam for fourteen months, nine days, and two hours, his original departure date delayed by the Tet Offensive. He wrote two other novels, Red Flags and The Trudeau Vector, which was published in ten other countries. Publisher and co-founder of the Soho Press, Jurjevics worked for years in the book industry.