Aiken In Check: A Spy Game Novel

by Michael Frost Beckner

Overview

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

Gladys: Feeling a little paranoid on our last day?

Nathan Muir: When did Noah build the ark, Gladys? Before the rain, before the rain.

Love or country? To save one you must sacrifice the other...

The epic climax to the Aiken Trilogy rooted in the Robert Redford/Brad Pitt film Spy Game, it's the question faced by Nathan Muir protégé Russell Aiken when he defects to Cuba.

Haunted by the ghosts of past, present, and future spies, Aiken is trapped in a lethal battle with Havana intelligence officers desperate to discover the CIA's top spy hidden inside Fidel Castro's government.

Aiken must betray Nathan Muir and Tom Bishop-exposing CIA operations that link Cuba, China, and Venezuela in a startling conspiracy-in order to rescue the woman he loves...all in a single night without leaving the hotel room of his interrogation.

"The moral ambiguities of John le Carré, the technical precision of Tom Clancy, and the violent impact of Robert Ludlum." The US Review of Books

Bursting with Aiken's wit and erstwhile confusion, Aiken in Check is a love letter confession, wrapped in the haunting of three spies' dangerous past, on a Christmas Eve that by dawn will see him lose everything or become the grandmaster of the Spy Game.

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

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798985597462
Publisher:	Montrose Station Press LLC
Publication date:	09/05/2022
Series:	The Aiken Trilogy , #3
Pages:	514
Sales rank:	326,107
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.31(d)

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. Branching 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 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. 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.

Editorial Reviews

10/03/2022

The climactic installment in Beckner’s Aiken Trilogy, which springboards from the Beckner-penned 2001 film Spy Game, pits the restless, free-associating mind of its CIA narrator, Russell Aiken, against the agency itself as he strives to save the life of agent Nina Estrada from torture and death in Castro’s Cuba. Aiken muses early on “Nina or America. To save one, I lose them both.” The novel that follows tests his loyalty, his sanity, and even—in a bold technological twist that edges Aiken in Check beyond the expectations of most late-Cold War espionage thrillers—his understanding of space, time, and even the soul. Haunted by Spy Game’s espionage grandmasters Nathan Muir and Tom Bishop, and long-ago CIA failures and betrayals, Beckner’s grand finale finds Aiken coming into his own—but at what price?

Each entry in the trilogy has proven increasingly daring, ambitious, and thematically rich, while holding true to its spy-game roots. For all its confrontations and double-crosses—the best of which go down as bitterly as cyanide capsules—Aiken in Check deepens its predecessors’ voice-driven, existential-minded inquiry into the spy life itself. Beckner’s plotting is deft, as you’d expect from a screenwriter and TV producer who made a career in military and espionage thrillers, never predictable; his infectious fascination with real-world snoop tech and tradecraft, meanwhile, ensures the suspense and surprises always feel convincing and human scaled.

Two crucial elements set Beckner’s series apart even from the top of the thriller heap. First, as a stylist he’s a showman, a razzle-dazzle sentence crafter adept (like his academic mentor, T.C. Boyle) at catching readers up in the minds of protagonists whose lives seem to be spinning out of control. Second is Aiken himself, an epileptic hero whose mind moves faster than his body, and whose disorientation about his place in the games mastered by the likes of Muir and Bishop is only compounded by the possibilities of this entry’s technological marvel. That invention exemplifies the trilogy: an entirely plausible device freighted with moral, philosophical weight, demanding reconceptualization of not just how spycraft is done but what it means and costs.

Takeaway: The epic climax of this trilogy rooted in the film Spy Game thrills as it digs deep.

Great for fans of: Charles McCarry, Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost.

Production grades Cover: A Design and typography: A Illustrations: N/A Editing: A Marketing copy: A

BookLife Reviews

This is that rare novel that teaches as well as entertains. Even as it raises questions and gives answers, it invites readers to think about right and wrong, good and evil, loyalty and betrayal, and the real cost of a life lived in service to one's country rather than one's self.—The US Review of Books

From the Publisher