Review: The Head Men by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Destroyer 31 The Head Men by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Jimmy Carter is in the White House and has discovered CURE, knows what it can do, and is so confident in its abilities that he refuses to worry about a very credible assassination threat. Indeed, he’s so confident in Remo and Chiun’s skills that he decides to stops payments that have been made by several presidents as a preventive measure to stay an unknown assassin’s hand. The problem is that Remo cannot defend the president from a threat that he doesn’t know about.

 

This is a much better story than the series has been producing of late. The problem is credible and the solution—hinted at by Sinanju legend—was well thought out. There’s a lot of muddling around in the middle that really wasn’t that fun, but when Remo finally figures out what’s going on things start moving well again.

 

Perhaps the best element of the story was the way in which Murphy and Sapir took a centuries-old Sinanju teaching fable and showed how it directly applied to modern day problems. The Masters of Sinanju are not the best solely because of their extraordinary physical abilities. They have been in the assassination trade for thousands of years and have learned just about everything there is to know about killing people. It was very clever of the authors to show how relevant that ancient knowledge can be today.