By: Eric Van Lustbader
Year: 2008
Genre: Fiction
After so many adrenaline-soaked years risking his life, Jason Bourne is chafing under the quiet life of a linguistics professor. Aware of his frustrations, his academic mentor asks for help investigating the murder of a former student by a previously unknown Muslim extremist sect called the Black Legion. The young man died carrying information about the group’s terrorist activities, including an immediate plan to attack the United States.
In Europe, Bourne’s investigation of the Black Legion turns into one of the deadliest and most tangled operations of his double life-the pursuit of the leader of a murderous terrorist group with roots in the darkest days of World War II.
One word: blech.
Okay, I’m not the target audience for this book. I watched the movies for Matt Damon, everything else was action movie whipped cream on top. I still don’t actually know what the three Bourne movies are really about because the plots were pretty convoluted. But I thought, “Hey, this book should be fun, right?”
Wrong.
First, I really disliked Jason Bourne. Yes, I know he doesn’t know who he really is and the love of his life is dead, but what a self-absorbed, petulant whiner! Everyone else in the story is a sneaking jerk (nice words, this is a family blog) with their own agendas. And I’m not sure what the agendas are. Everyone wants something different and Bourne travels the world piecing this all together with a woman whom he doesn’t really trust for a mentor he thinks is lying to him. Maybe. Well, possibly. I think.
Van Lusbader spends so much time showing us how smart and witty he is and how gritty and dark he can write, that he forgets that sometimes we need to know what is going on. There were so many characters that had so many grudges to revenge that I still don’t know WHY the bad guy did the bad thing that Bourne had to stop with some amazing killing, kung fu and fluent language skills.
Okay, maybe I’m being too rough. I haven’t read the original Bourne books by Ludlum (and yes, the TM is in the actual title of the book) and maybe they were just as bad. And the reviewers on Amazon.com say that Van Lustbader is a good author in his own right, but reading through this book was like pulling my eyebrows out one at a time. I finished it because I really wanted to see if this all made sense. And I guess it did. Sort of. But I won’t be reading any more of Van Lustbader’s Bourne books (I will try one of Ludlum’s originals, though, just for comparison).
My rating: 1 out of 5 stars