Juris Jurjevics Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Juris Jurjevics is a bestselling literary fiction and thriller author best known for writing the Vietnam based thriller “Red Flags.” Jurjevics was born in 1943 in Latvia and after the fall of the Nazis, his family loved in displaced people’s camps in Germany where they lied for half a decade before finally moving to the United States. In the States, he spent much of his childhood in the Bronx in New York. As a young man, he got enlisted and fought in the Vietnam War, where he gets most of the inspiration for two of his most popular novels. Over the years, he has also worked with a variety of publishing houses including Dial Press, Avon Books, Harper & Row, and E.P. Dutton. In 1986, he teamed up with a friend to establish Soho Press where he was president and publisher for the first twenty years. He only stepped down when he decied to pursue his passion for writing and soon after published his debut novel “The Trudeau Vector.” The novel went on to do very well and was optioned by National Geographic and published in more than twelve countries. Always willing to help others, he assisted six friends with their manuscripts, conducted San Diego Reader author interviews, and wrote feature articles, even as he was writing “Red Flags” his second novel. He also got a job as a tutor at Boston’s Emerson College, where he taught graduate programs in publishing.

Much of what Jurjevics writes about he gets from his experiences growing up in refugee camps and the war in Vietnam. The experience of hunger and humiliation in the displaced person camps in Germany and the experiences in the war made him develop a tender heart. This is the reason he established an independent publishing press to help those who had no means. He routinely helped people in need such as a homeless woman who lived in an alcove near the offices of Soho Press. He would also give free copies of books he had been given for review to a homeless bookseller who had set up shop on one of the intersections on his commute. Juris was advisor and reader to many that requested his editorial help. He provided his red pen to everything from eulogies, full-length manuscripts, high school homework assignments, and legal depositions. Among his writing clients include his general practitioner that was penning an essay collection, a friend who needed basic creative writing training for his Civil War biography of a general, his landlord, agent a friend of a friend that was writing a memoir, and aspiring authors he had once met while he was giving a seminar and critique of manuscripts at a seminar.

Asked about why he wrote two novels about the Vietnam War forty years after coming back from the war, he said he was filling a gap. There was nothing written about the American military’s battle with the South Vietnamese. He was interested in writing about the treasonous yet elaborate corruption of their hosts and the American complicity in it all. The Vietnamese used to divert supplies of rations, medicines, weapons, ammunition, and gasoline to the enemy an on the black market while the Americans looked the other way. They were also not interested in fighting the North Vietnamese and for the most part, left the fighting to the Americans and the village militias. Finally, he felt it was his duty to describe the mistreatment of the Montagnard tribes who suffered a lot under the Vietnamese. For his two novels, he wrote did a lot of research and he has said that he read more than a thousand non-fiction books on the subject. In the process, he assembled more than 500 books on the subject and he often grants access to researchers that need to read more on the subject. As for his debut novel “The Trudeau Vector,” it is a biotechnical thriller where he presents a difficult science concept and also creates complex characters.

“The Trudeau Vector” by Juris Jurjevics is a compelling bio technothriller novel. At the start of the novel, four members of an Antarctic Research Station have just gone missing without a trace. A few days later, three of them are discovered dead in twisted positions of agonizing and inexplicably grotesque death while still in their working suits. The fourth man is without his suit and is found dead and naked on a nearby spit of land. An epidemiologist named Jessie Hanley who is an employee of a Canadian biotechnology firm is engaged by the government to investigate the cause of the freak deaths at the isolated facility. The author paints the details of the Trudeau Station facility and in doing so brings the scientists living on the station to life even as they live in a beautiful but brutal Arctic environment. There is also a parallel plot that tells of a cold war secret and Russian submarines. The story also tells of the origins of the pathogen that had ravaged the station. It is a compelling story that takes a deep dive into medical intricacies and deep science in a plot that shines and twists like the aurora borealis.

“Red Queen” by Jurjevics is the story of Erik Rider, an army cop that prefers to fight his battles on the streets and saloons of Saigon. As such, he is not thrilled when he is posted to a remote outpost in the Central Highlands, where he is charged with dismantling an opium operation run by the Viet Cong in the jungles. When he gets to Cheo Reo his station, things are thick as the South Vietnamese troops are sitting idle with practically no commander, while the Viet Cong mass in the surrounding hills intending to deliver a killer blow. Meanwhile, sixty thousand aboriginals have revolted and are now raring for a fight to get back their land. Rider is soon involved with an alluring doctor who works with the aboriginals and a local man who works for the CIA. As he gets closer to the opium fields, he discovers that some of the enemies he had to fight are not outside the perimeter as someone in Cheo Reo is coming for him.

Juris Jurjevics’ “Play the Red Queen” is an outstanding mystery set in Saigon. It is 1963 and sergeants Clovis Robeson and Ellsworth Miser of the American Army Criminal Investigations Division are working to stop the Red Queen. The assassin’s trademark is a playing card with a female figure that he leaves at every murder scene. Major James Furth the third victim in a fortnight had been shot by the assassin while taking lunch at an outdoor eatery. According to witnesses, the assassin was a good-looking Vietnamese woman aged about 20 and riding a motorbike. She had left the trademark playing card on the ground. By striking in the Saigon which had so far been a very safe city for the Americans she had made things very complicated. Captain Beckle who Robeson and Miser’s boss has found out from a Vietcong deserter that the Red Queen wats to take out a major player rather than just taking out random people. Jurjevics writes a page-turner that captures the essence of place and time with evocative prose and atmosphere.