Warren Murphy and Molly Cochran Otto Penzler Presents Grandmaster

Otto Penzler Presents Grandmaster

Warren Murphy and Molly Cochran

Forge, Nov 2005, $14.95

ISBN: 0765311631

They were born on the same day on different continents as Justin Gilead is an American and Alexander Zharkov is a Russian. They first meet at ten years of age over a chess game. However, that night Justin watches assassins kill his father in a seedy Paris bar. He is rescued from the same fate by monks from the highest mountains in Asia who were looking for him as they believe he is the latest reincarnation of Brahma. For the next decade and a half he lives and studies Buddhism under their tutelage.

However Russian troops attack and burn down the remote monastery. Justin survives but is filled with rage and a need for vengeance against the Russians. He obtains work for the CIA enabling him to focus on his target Zarkhov, the chief of the Russian top secret espionage elite unit Nichevo. The life and death chess game between two masters will leave one as the GRANDMASTER and the other dead.

Readers will quickly understand why this novel won an Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1985 though the Iron Curtain has since fallen, turning what was contemporary back then into historical especially the insight into the life and death of grandmaster chess as played by the Russian Bears. Justin moves the action-packed plot forward as his Buddhist trained skills enable him to accomplish seemingly impossible achievements; on the other hand Zarkhov is a vestige of the Soviet Union adding to the sense that this is a historical thriller. Fans will marvel at how newlyweds (at that time) Warren Murphy and Molly Cochran gifted their readers with a novel that remains tense and exciting though the perspective has changed.

Harriet Klausner