Muir's Gambit: Book 1 the Spy Game Trilogy

by Michael Frost Beckner

"Relentlessly tense... This smashing espionage tale kicks off what promises to be a smart, indelible series." Kirkus Reviews

"A thinking man's thriller... A real adrenaline blast... I loved it!" ROBERT REDFORD, Spy Game

Tom "You don't just trade these people like they're baseball cards! It's not a game!"
Nathan "That's exactly what it is and it's no kid's game either. This is a whole other game. And it's serious. And it's dangerous. And it's not one you want to lose."

It's 48 hours before the events of the movie classic Spy Game and Nathan Muir is about to see his world implode...

Who'd want to assassinate Charlie March? The original Cold War hero. Mentor, brother, confessor-in-chief to Nathan Muir, he's the spy who waltzed in from the cold and wrote a bestseller in the Florida sunshine.

But when a bomb on his yacht puts Charlie March on ice, and his dying words implicate Muir, the CIA dispatch hard-luck Agency lawyer Russell Aiken to force Muir's confession and bury forty years of dirty secrets. By legal means...or otherwise.

"A chilling, inspired espionage thriller." EDITOR'S PICK Publisher's Weekly

2023 GOLD MEDAL WINNER - BEST FIRST BOOK - Independent Publishers IPPY Awards
2022 WINNER - SPY THRILLER OF THE YEAR - Best Thrillers Book Awards
2022 BOOK OF THE YEAR, FINALIST - Foreword Reviews INDIES Awards

The protégé Muir cast aside in favor of Tom Bishop, Aiken thirsts for payback unaware that Muir launched a different kind of game for him and Bishop long ago, and Aiken has 24 hours to learn its rules, plays, and lethal stakes.

Epic in scope, Muir's Gambit sweeps from the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir to Cyprus terror bombings, Congo coup d'états, Angolan proxy wars, and into the final hours of the Berlin Wall. And for two men untethered from morality, all those lies leave just one final night for redemption.

"It's policy versus heart... Will challenge you in ways you haven't been challenged before." TONY SCOTT Spy Game

"A chess game...laid out in the real world of espionage." BRAD PITT Spy Game

Buy Now and return to the world of Nathan Muir and Tom Bishop but be in Spy Game "It's not how you play the game... It's how the game plays you."

404 pages, Paperback

Published October 12, 2023

About the author

In 1989, Michael Frost Beckner's script for Sniper launched a military-thriller franchise now in production on its eighth sequel. Three consecutive record-breaking spec script sales and three films later, Tony Scott directed Beckner's original screenplay "Spy Game." An international blockbuster that paired Robert Redford and Brad Pitt as CIA partners and rivals, it is now a classic in the espionage genre.

Beckner branched into television with his CIA-based drama "The Agency" for CBS, Beckner's pilot predicted Osama bin Laden's terror attack and the War on Terror four months before 9/11. In that series alone, Beckner would go on to predictively dramatize three more future international terror events. Having penned more than twenty-five pilots for network and cable television, miniseries and docudramas, and dozens of original motion picture screenplays, adaptations, and rewrites, he is a Hollywood institution.

In 2001, intrigued by the idea of writing a two-man play focused on the four meetings between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee over their lifetimes, Beckner embarked on a twenty-year research odyssey, advised by more than a dozen of the top Civil War historians in America, which saw him transform his intimate theater piece into the most comprehensive Civil War mini-series ever written. Variously known as "To Appomattox" and "Battle Hymn," and now entitled "A Nation Divided," for the first time, Beckner’s full 12-hour scripts are being released to the public in three volumes.

As a commentator on American espionage, Beckner has appeared on CNN, Fox News, CBS News, TF1 in France, and as a featured guest of Bill Maher on HBO. Now, in conjunction with the twentieth anniversary of "Spy Game," Beckner returns to the world of Nathan Muir and Tom Bishop with the release of his trilogy of Spy Game novels: "Muir's Gambit," "Bishop's Endgame," and "Aiken in Check."

Reviews

[Oli Turner]

#muirsgambit by #michaelfrostbeckner published in 2022. A prequel to the film #spygame . I am very fond of the film and only recently found out about this series of novels by the writer of the screenplay. This takes place maybe 48 hours before the start of the film (even if some of the timeline may not match exactly). It’s written in the first person from the perspective of a CIA lawyer interviewing Nathan muir about the recent death of muir’s mentor. It provides plenty of flashbacks to muir’s work with the agency, some overlapping with the events shown in the film. There are revelations that allow the film to be viewed differently (SPOILERS Muir’s wives were all real, Bishop was married to Hadley, Muir is Bishop’s father). I wonder how much was in the original pitch for the film and how much has been retroactively inserted. I really enjoyed the novel. Although it’s almost impossible to determine what is “real” within the context of the story. We have an unreliable narrator being told a number of stories from a man who lies for a living. muir telling the narrator what other people said does tend to break the rule of “show don’t tell” and some of the flashbacks within flashbacks can be a little jarring. I wonder what this book would be like if told from a third person perspective in chronological order- perhaps it would be too choppy with lots of little paragraphs and a lot of forward jumps in time. I think I will have to get the rest of the series particularly as some of the revelations (MORE SPOILERS death of muir’s first wife and unborn child) were so impactful.
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