Book Review-Older Books 21

The Bourne Legacy by Eric Van Lustbader.  Published by St. Martin’s Press, June 2004, 453 pages.

Chechen rebels are seeking an end to Russian oppression.  They are being led by a man known as the Shayk.  This man, Stepan Spalko is otherwise known as a humanitarian, helping people worldwide, but his other agenda is to disrupt a summit that is to be held in the near future, where world leaders hope to come to an agreement on how to end terrorism and live in peace.

In planning his evil he awakens a sleeping lion.  David Webb is a college professor, who happens to also have been one of the CIA’s most deadly and skilled killers for hire.  He was known as Jason Bourne.  And after a failed attempt on his life, he calls on one of his mentors only to find himself on the run suspected of the murders of the two men who could have helped him.  His new family is sent away as he searches for who could have killed his friends.  His search takes him from Georgetown to Paris, Budapest and Iceland.  His adventure keeps him barely ahead of authorities who have been told to shoot first and ask questions later.  Peril and danger is the name of this trip and during it he finds more answers to the many questions he has regarding his very cloudy past.  Not only are all police agencies searching for him, there is also a killer toying with him and causing him significant pain.  Everywhere he turns new bodies are turning up with the finger marking him as the man who brought them to their end.

As a sequel to the Bourne series by Robert Ludlum, his estate has chosen Eric Van Lustbader to bring Jason Bourne back to life.  After the first chapter this story is a fast-paced pager-turner.  There seems to be no end of people that want to see Jason Bourne dead or captured and behind every corner a new evil confronts him.  Eric Van Lustbader did justice to Robert Ludlum’s character Jason Bourne.