Assassination Gambit

Assassination Gambit is a long mystery novel series by Yuan Taiji following The Curse of Lu Ban. Published in six volumes by Beijing Times Chinese Press, it comprises The Improvised Gambit, The Gambling-Kill Gambit, The Interception-Kill Gambit, The Gambit Beyond Gambits, The Qi-Kill Gambit and The Assassination-King Gambit. The story begins with a major tomb-robbing case on Tianma Mountain in Changsha, Hunan, in 2013, which pulls back the curtain on a buried chapter of history: during the wars of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, Lihen Valley, one of the three great assassin organizations of the jianghu, receives a pursuit-of-hatred notice and resolves, to preserve its honor and fulfill its founder's last wish, to carry out an unprecedented assassination gambit. The work constructs six specialized disciplines for Lihen Valley—the Power-and-Force, Poison, Seduction, Intimidation-and-Fraud, Artifice-and-Weapon, and Arcane-Strategy branches—corresponding respectively to martial skill, poison craft, seduction, illusion, traps and stratagem. Much of the book is devoted to the assassins' skills and the design of "clever points": the precondition for an assassination to become a gambit is that every link fits flawlessly. Masters of the valley such as Qi Junyuan are drawn one after another into the improvised gambit, the gambling kill, the interception kill, the gambit beyond gambits, the qi kill and the assassination-king gambit, while historical figures including Chai Rong, Zhao Kuangyin, Li Jing and Han Xizai appear in turn, and the undercurrents of political intrigue among the Great Zhou, Southern Tang, Chu, Nanping, Later Shu and Wuyue surface as well. The narrative advances through layer upon layer of nested puzzles, portraying the assassins' devotion to honor and their life-and-death choices amid traps, stratagems and political struggle.