Review: The Final Death by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Destroyer 29 The Final Death by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

The Final Death continues a string of very weak Destroyer novels. The best element was a conversation between exiting President Gerald Ford and newly sworn in President Jimmy Carter in which Ford passes to his successor knowledge of the existence of CURE. Carter, of course, is horrified to find out that there is an off-the-books government agency acting unconstitutionally to protect the country. He is indignantly ready to close CURE down, until Ford’s warning sinks in and he realizes that maybe, just maybe, he will need an agency no one knows about to help him do his job.

 

The actual plot is weak—a Chinese cult that has been around for at least a thousand years is trying to kill off Americans by poisoning beef. While the plot was bad, the element of the ages old cult let us take a look at an earlier stage of Sinanju before they became the sun-source of the martial arts. Watching Master Pak at work shows where many of Chiun’s hard-learned lessons came from. But overall, this was not enough to salvage the story.