Playing off today's headlines, Burying the Dead serves up a high stakes game of love and death set on the power courts of Washington, DC, and other glittering world capitals.

There Dimitri "Dimi" Orlov is a rising Russian tennis star whose glamorous, globetrotting career provides the perfect cover for his real day job -- agent and assassin. Trained by his government from the time he's discovered in an orphanage, Dimi is assigned to assassinate the president of the United States -- a brilliant but arrogant onetime New York prosecutor who's proved too independent for his Russian backers -- by romancing and enlisting his abused first lady, Catherine Darlington.

Dimi courts the lovely, loveless Catherine at Renaissance House, a new cultural center in historic Dupont Circle that's a front for Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and at the US Open. There he's shadowed by CIA agent Mitch Abramson, who has begun to connect the dots. But just as the various matches - Dimi and Catherine, Dimi and Mitch -- heat up, Dimi makes a choice that could have his bosses take him out of the game permanently.

Georgette Gouveia is the author of The Penalty for Holding, a 2018 Lambda Literary Award finalist, and Water Music (Greenleaf Book Group). They're part of her series, The Games Men Play, which is also the name of her sports/culture blog.

A 2018 Folio Women in Media Award winner, Gouveia is also the editor in chief of WAG, a luxury lifestyles publication named a top magazine by the New York Press Association, and has several nonfiction book credits as an arts essayist and biographer.

For more information, visit thegamesmenplay.com.

Playing off today's headlines, Burying the Dead serves up a high stakes game of love and death set on the power courts of Washington, DC, and other glittering world capitals.There Dimitri "e;Dimi"e; Orlov is a rising Russian tennis star whose glamorous, globetrotting career provides the perfect cover for his real day job -- agent and assassin. Trained by his government from the time he's discovered in an orphanage, Dimi is assigned to assassinate the president of the United States -- a brilliant but arrogant onetime New York prosecutor who's proved too independent for his Russian backers -- by romancing and enlisting his abused first lady, Catherine Darlington.Dimi courts the lovely, loveless Catherine at Renaissance House, a new cultural center in historic Dupont Circle that's a front for Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and at the US Open. There he's shadowed by CIA agent Mitch Abramson, who has begun to connect the dots. But just as the various matches - Dimi and Catherine, Dimi and Mitch -- heat up, Dimi makes a choice that could have his bosses take him out of the game permanently.