Review: Power Play by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Destroyer 36 Power Play by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Remo and Chiun get the task of protecting Wesley Pruiss, publisher of the aptly named pornographic magazine, Gross. Pruiss has been crippled by a knife wielding assassin shortly after announcing that he was investing his fortune in figuring out how to power a town completely by solar energy. (He actually “bought” the town so that he could make extremely raunchy movies without trouble from the authorities.) For some reason, Harold Smith, the Director of CURE believes that Pruiss will come through on the solar energy and sends Remo and Chiun to keep him alive.

 

This is not the sort of mission Remo excels at. What usually happens is that Remo meets the bad guy early in the book, likes the bad guy, and totally doesn’t understand that the bad guy is moving against him until very late in the novel. Chiun, for his part, usually figures everything out very quickly and just doesn’t tell Remo what’s really going on.

 

To make this book more interesting than most, Murphy and Sapir introduce a group of renegade descendants of Sinanju villagers. (Sinanju is the impoverished North Korean fishing town that Chiun calls home.) These descendants betrayed one of Chiun’s ancestors after he had taught them how to wield a knife effectively and he exiled them. Interestingly enough, the knife-wielding assassin in this book does not believe the myths of the Masters of Sinanju and is in for a big surprise when he runs into Remo.

 

Overall, this is a fun novel despite its weaknesses. The elements that make this series so enjoyable—the legends, the relationship between Remo and Chiun, Chiun’s peculiar way of viewing the world, and the action—are all here.