Ludlum's novels are set in a world apart from such petty concerns, where the chase was all; where indeed the fate of the world rests in the balance. In almost two dozen novels, such as
The Scarlatti Inheritance, The Bourne Identity, The Chancellor Manuscript, The Icarus Agenda, and the books of the "Covert One" series, Ludlum has posited a world of deception and suspense, a battle of the good guys against the bad guys--and their list is long: greedy multinationals corporations, ultraconservatives, neo-Nazis, international terrorists. And the neatest hat trick of all, when Ludlum died in 2001 at the age of seventy-three, his work did not die with him. Like one of the everlasting heroes of one of his thrillers, he rises from beyond the grave with novels in the works, plotted or outlined and completed by other collaborators. Several years after his death, a handful of such posthumous books have already reached the bestseller lists.
Ludlum "has his share of unkind critics who complain of implausible plots, leaden prose, and, as a caustic reviewer once sneered, an absence of 'redeeming literary values to balance the vulgar sensationalism,'" Susan Baxter and Mark Nichols noted in Maclean's.
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