What do you look for in a thriller? A plot with some slight pretensions of credibility? Forget it. This book can not summon the energy even to pretend that it is more than a puerile wish-fulfillment fantasy.
How about credible characters, speaking authentic dialogue? Forget that too. The characters are never more than plot devices, and their dialogue is literally unspeakable. A man wants to tell another man that someone has proved untrustworthy, and does so by saying this: "His august persona - as in Caesar Augustus - should be trashed. Slippery intellectuality aside, he's a whore. He had promise once, more than I let him know, but he let it all go by the boards in a flamboyant quest for his own personal grail." I repeat, that's supposed to be a character speaking in a conversation.
All right, what about basic writing? You know, beginner-level stuff, economy, elegance, precision, show me don't tell me, that kind of thing? All absent. The author's motto seems to be "More is Better". Adjectives are his favourite: "...her tanned, dark-haired, handsome younger brother...", long after we have been introduced to him and formed a mental picture of him, is typical. Characters never "say" when they can "explode", "announce", "whisper", "intone" and so on, always a giveaway for lazy writing.
Pace? My copy is 725 pages long. There is enough material here for about 300, which is coincidentally as far as I got before deciding that life is too short for trash like this. The Bourne franchise is one of those unusual cases where the films are better - much better - than the books. What a pity there is no zero-star rating. Sufficient warning.
