(Webb’s wife, Marie, has been a main character in both previous books their young children are new additions.)Ĭarlos is a very different character than he was in The Bourne Identity. It conveys a message to Webb that will force him to surface: Carlos is close to discovering your true identity, and consequently the identities of your wife and children. They get away, but then that was the point. He proves it by luring them to a trap at an amusement park, which makes for a terrific opening to the novel. The assassin knows the identities of Webb’s two closest friends, retired CIA agent Alexander Conklin and Washington-based psychiatrist Dr. Somehow, the Jackal has tracked him down. Thirteen years after the events of The Bourne Identity (which was published in 1980, but actually took place a few years earlier), David Webb’s worst fears have come true. (See: The Bourne Supremacy.) With Ultimatum, however, it feels like he was struggling to equal the page count now expected of him, and augmented a decent central story with superfluous subplots that never entirely gel. Ludlum’s novels grew longer and longer throughout the Eighties, but were usually so packed with twists and turns and slam-bang action that they generally earned that length. Most of The Bourne Ultimatum’s fatal flaws are tied in with the fact that it’s simply too long. So The Bourne Ultimatum is certainly worth reading for fans of the series who have read the other two novels, but they must be braced for a bit of a letdown, comparatively. However, it’s still a chance to spend time with characters we’ve grown to like and in whose fate we’re now invested, and we do-eventually-get a definitive and more or less satisfying conclusion to the plight of David Webb that began a decade earlier in Ludlum’s masterwork, The Bourne Identity. Too many coincidences, too much filler, and Ludlum’s weakest conspiracy (so half-baked it doesn’t even really fit in with the rest of the story) doom this final Bourne novel. Carlos payoff audiences have desired ever since the first book (in which American agent David Webb assumed the role of a deadly assassin known as Jason Bourne in order to ensnare the real assassin, Carlos the Jackal), but it fails to maintain the furious energy of the previous books in getting there. The Bourne Ultimatum delivers the epic Bourne vs.

Still, it’s a great title, so I won’t quibble.Īfter two fantastic entries (read my reviews here and here) in what ultimately became a trilogy, Robert Ludlum made a rare misstep with the third novel. More of a supremacy, but that’s already been used. Is there an Ultimatum? Hm… Not really, I guess. Is the hero named Bourne? For all intents and purposes.

The bourne ultimatum novel