In high school, when I wasn’t reading Kurt Vonnegut (Cat’s Cradle, Jailbird, Galapagos, Bluebeard, and my favorite, Hocus Pocus) I was reading Robert Ludlum (all three Jason Bourne books, The Matarese Circle, The Icarus Agenda, and my favorite, The Holcroft Covenant).

So when I spy a cleverly designed cover in a bookstore at ATL:

ROBERT LUDLUM’S
BEST SELLING CHARACTER JASON BOURNE RETURNS IN
THE BOURNE LEGACY
A NEW NOVEL BY
ERIC VAN LUSTBADER

I thought it would be worth $8 to try it out in paperback.

The author doesn’t take long to separate this book from Robert Ludlum’s stock. Jason Bourne is implicated in the murder of his CIA boss and his psychologist to distract the CIA from a planned terrorist attack on a pending terrorist summit between the U.S., Russia, and four Arab states. Bourne’s son, originally thought killed in Cambodia when he was four, is now also an assassin and is contracted by the terrorist leader to take out Bourne should the CIA fail to bring him in.

In the course of escaping the CIA and his son, Bourne learns that a leader of an international charity is bent on acquiring the latest-and-greatest biological agent and killing everyone at the summit. We also learn that he is the person who hires Bourne’s son and arranges the killing of the CIA agent and the shrink. The plot takes us through Paris and Budapest, several women who turn out to be double-agents (it seems the only honest woman in this book is Bourne’s wife—even the female National Security Advisor is opportunist to her own detriment), and a subplot where the charity leader poses as a “Shaykh” to win over Chechan rebels as another distraction to be used in his terrorist scheme.

Chase scenes are described well, but the hand-to-hand descriptions are slow and lose the speed of conflict. There are a lot of family and relationship issues between major characters: Bourne thinks his son is dead, his son wants to kill Bourne for leaving him, the “pious” Shaykh seducing the wife of the leader of the Chechan rebels, the daughter of a CIA underground agent in Budapest wants to kill her father, and others. It’s a small, small world.

The son, saved from a trap by Dad of course, does come around and save Bourne from tooth extraction; the Shaykh uses dentistry as his favorite form of intimidation, removing teeth sans anesthesia to extract information from a spy. Bourne goes through the guilt of abandoning a son for dead, the Shaykh leaves his woman to pull the trigger on the biological agent, and the daughter gets her man. And, of course, the biological agent is one trigger pull away from killing everyone in a half-square-mile radius, but the son talks her out of it by appealing to her Muslim values.

There is also a scene where Bourne hacks the CIA database but leaves behind his “IP address”, which is given as a normal address like a phone call trace. Oops. At the end of the book, our superagent finds himself yet again on a boat with the killer’s gun pointed at him, and the author reminds the reader that yes, this has been done before. This time, though, Bourne thinks of his son, takes another action, and doesn’t end up floating in the sea waiting for a fisherman to save him.

For the money, the book was an OK distraction from several hours of flight time, but I won’t recommend this book to any Ludlum fans. The lack of attention to detail in some places, like the IP address issue, and the dependency of the author on the betrayal of family to generate conflict are not suitable for a follow-up to Ludlum, and I’m sorry he put his name on it.