Robert Ludlam’s the Bourne Sanction-Eric Van Lustbader

Robert Ludlam’s the Bourne Sanction
Eric Van Lustbader
Grand Central, Jul 29 2008, $25.95
ISBN: 0446539864

Still reeling from the death of Martin, Moira Trevor asks her friend Jason Bourne who is David Webb in his office at Georgetown University. Jason explains David is a widower and a father of two children who live in Canada with their maternal grandparents as he wants them as far away from the BOURNE LEGACY as possible. He tells Moira that he returned to the teaching position as head of Comparative Linguistics Department, a role his late wife Marie loved for him, Moira’s anodyne is go back to field work, which is why she has come to visit him. Her employer NextGen Energy Solutions fears a terrorist attack at the Long Beach port.

However, not too long after returning to his Professor Webb persona, Bourne is bored with normalcy. He informs his academic mentor Professor Dominic Specter only to see two thugs grab the man; Bourne rescues him. Specter explains his father died fighting the Eastern Brotherhood, Muslims who claim since WWII to want to fit in peacefully with the West, but who are terrorist known as the Black Legion. He asks Bourne to kill leader Semion Icoupov who has started a terrorist plot to devastate America that has begun the countdown with the murder of an associate Pyotr by Leonid Arkadin.

This is an exciting entry in the Bourne saga as the action starts from the moment Webb meets Specter for coffee and never slows down until the final Treadstone-Conklin coda. The story line is fast-paced though the European connection with WW II roots seems a bit over the Alps. Still no one will care as the Bourne adrenalin flows with he doing what he does best battling bad guys to prevent a terrorist attack; unable to wait for High Noon with an assassin sent to murder him.

Harriet Klausner