Overview
As the Cold War heats up in 1981, a pro golfer on the precipice of losing his career is recruited by the CIA to join the international tour—and recover a Soviet device that could bring nuclear Armageddon
After a volcanic, expletive-laden meltdown at the US Open broadcast on national TV, Johnny Cassidy thinks his golf career is over. On the verge of turning thirty, he is suspended from the Tour, his sponsor drops him, and he’s behind on his ex-wife’s alimony. As he sits at the bar in the clubhouse, he fears he will descend once again into the alcoholism that nearly destroyed him years before.
So when his long-lost friend Will Harlan from his college golf team suddenly appears with an offer to have his uncle become his new sponsor so he can keep playing, Johnny can hardly say no. Even when Will’s “uncle” turns out to be “Uncle Sam,” and the new game he is playing is with the CIA, where the stakes are no less than life and death.
Soon Johnny is winging his way to the Azores for a crash course in spycraft, and then on to West Berlin where he must mix championship golf at the German Open with the rescue of a beautiful Polish scientist on the other side of the Berlin Wall—who has invented a device that could determine the fate of the Cold War.
Packed with cloak and dagger spy adventure, seductive KGB assassins, and pulse-pounding championship golf action on exotic courses around the world, Sudden Death is the perfect book for golfer readers, James Bond fans, and armchair travelers who love an old-fashioned, page-turning espionage thriller.
This is Book 1 in a new series of spy novels, each taking place in a new year and a new setting in the Cold War of the 1980s. Johnny Cassidy will return next year in Ballstriker, set in 1982, with action in Italy, England, and the South of France.
