The Bourne Deception

April 6, 2009
Shadowy master assassin Jason Bourne spends too much time offstage in bestseller Lustbader’s cliché-ridden fourth thriller in the Ludlum franchise (after The Bourne Sanction
). Having pushed his latest archenemy, Russian Leonid Arkadin, off a tanker into the ocean, Bourne assumes his foe must be dead. Not long after, Arkadin ambushes Bourne, hitting him with a rifle shot that would’ve killed a normal man. Seriously but not mortally wounded, Bourne decides to keep his survival a secret. The duel between the pair gets submerged in a plot line about a corrupt U.S. defense secretary’s efforts to use the downing of a civilian airliner in Egypt by an Iranian missile as a casus belli. The action sequences and inevitable betrayals are old hat. Clumsy prose doesn’t help (“She was dead, but he could not forget her, or what she caused in him: the tiniest fissure in the speckled granite of his soul, through which her mysterious light had begun to trickle, like the first snowmelt of spring”).

August 31, 2009
Lustbader resurrects Ludlum's hero in this thriller that fails to recapture the intensity of the original but still packs plenty of punches. This time around, Jason Bourne must track down his would-be assassin, but finds himself in the middle of an investigation that could trigger a new world war. Jeremy Davidson brings the novel necessary realism with a range of believable characters. His ability to capture the subtleties of numerous accents and dialects without falling into caricature is commendable. A splendid reading of an otherwise routine action thriller. A Grand Central hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 6).