Can one man make history—and can another change it with a single bullet? It was a question that Professor Mikhal Lammeck had devoted his life to answering. An expert on history’s great political assassinations, he’s come to Havana in the spring of 1961 to seek the answer firsthand. For the more he sees of Cuba’s charismatic revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro, the more he’s convinced that he’s witnessing that rarest anomaly: the man who can change history…and who therefore must be murdered.

The wild CIA plots, the treacherous double crosses, the near- miraculous escapes, are already legendary, but it seems as if Castro’s number is finally up. With a massive U.S.-backed invasion of the island looming, a trap has been set that not even Castro can escape. The players of this deadly assassination game are as varied as they are lethal—organized-crime figures, CIA agents, the Cuban underground, even a reclusive American billionaire. And now, perhaps most unlikely of all, a distinguished history professor.

Mikhal Lammeck is thrust dead-center between a Cuban secret-police captain and a chillingly amoral American CIA agent. It’s a devil’s bargain, one that Lammeck has no choice but to accept, and it will give him unprecedented access to the secret history of one of the twentieth century’s greatest coups. Lammeck suddenly finds himself no longer only studying history, but making it. Hesoon becomes the unwilling mentor of a young man who’s arrived in Cuba—a confused marine sharpshooter determined to become the century’s most infamous assassin.

Seamlessly blending history and fiction into an electrifying page-turner, The Betrayal Game is that rarest of all thrillers—a novel so vividly real, it might very well be true.