Book Review: Kyd’s Game by Marc Rosenberg
Kyd’s Game by Marc Rosenberg is a spy thriller focusing on Neil Kyd, a former linguistics professor at Columbia University who the CIA once recruited because he was fluent in several languages, including Arabic, Russian, German, and Spanish.
With his skills, he was the perfect candidate for becoming a valuable CIA asset who could work undercover in Russia.
When his eleven-year-old daughter, Molly, was diagnosed with Batten disease, which was a death sentence for her, Kyd left the CIA and moved to his mother’s farm in Kansas to take care of her.
Then Wexler, a high-ranking CIA official, entered the stage, dangling a lifeline for Kyd – Molly’s acceptance into an exclusive experimental treatment program that would save her life – if only Kyd took a job to retrieve a memory card with highly sensitive and dangerous information on it from a Russian politician.
Now, despite leaving the world of espionage behind, Kyd was suddenly plunged back into it because he was desperate to save his daughter’s life. Wexler knew how to push Kyd’s buttons because he kept talking about how Molly’s illness was progressing faster, time was running out, and it was up to him to save her from dying.
Thus, Kyd reluctantly embarked on this mission to Russia, which quickly became dangerous when his main contact (his former lover’s brother) who had the video disk was assassinated. Now Kyd himself ended up being framed for murder.
A pawn in a larger game, Kyd found himself on the run, a fugitive in a hostile country, and he not only had to clear his name but also retrieve that very disk that could literally save his daughter’s life.
Kyd’s Game is a political and espionage thriller that kept me on the edge of my seat. However, it is not your typical shoot-them-up action spy thriller. It is so much more; it explores some heavy themes like loyalty, betrayal, and sacrifice. For Kyd, the stakes are extremely personal, and he is torn between his duty to his country and his love for his sick daughter.
This creates for him an internal conflict that remains with him throughout the entire novel as he tries to unravel the mystery, expose the real traitors, and save his own life while also fighting for his daughter’s life.
Our main hero is constantly driven by his desperation to save Molly, so he invariably becomes vulnerable to manipulations and takes risks. At the same time, his strong love for his daughter also gives him the strength to endure the capture and torture, and he eventually escapes because the promise of Molly’s treatment is the only light in Kyd’s dark life.
At its core, Kyd’s Game is about a man wrestling with impossible choices while trying to come to terms with the darkness that is within himself and the darkness that is all around him. It is a book that shows all the moral complexities that people in difficult situations have to face, just like Neil Kyd.
The novel did leave me wanting more, especially after the very last chapter. I was left wondering if Kyd would return to the CIA, even as a free agent, or if would he choose to remain a farmer and care for his sick daughter, or if that shot would be the end of all.
After reading the novel, I found it interesting to learn that Marc Rosenberg, who is an established screenwriter, initially wrote a movie script for Kyd’s Game 10 years ago. The inspiration was a video where a father and son, who were victims of a chemical attack, tried to escape.
