Robert Ludlum writes spy thrillers the way the rest of us play Scrabble. Ludlum has 25 tiles, with words on each—words like World War II, secret documents, Nazi war treasure, CIA, Vatican, Rio/Buenos Aires, Geneva/Zurich, Berlin, MI-5, Maserati, beautiful blonde, Gestapo, double agent, international banker, false passport. Each year Ludlum chooses half the tiles, face down, and turns them over, arranging them this way and that until some reasonably plausible sequence appears. He then plays them on a ...

["The Rhinemann Exchange" is an] espionage thriller set in the desperate last year of the Hitler war. The situation that ignites the action (nearly five hundred sanguineous pages of it) is preposterous but intellectually undemanding. Germany has perfected a gyroscopic airplane-guidance system but lacks the industrial diamonds needed to complete its terrible rocket missile; the United States has access to tons of industrial diamonds but its aerophysicists can't get the kinks out of its t...

What is the Scarlatti inheritance [in Ludlum's book of the same name]? Well, if you must know, you'll have to find your way through petrified forests of flashbacks to a Swiss hotel on the German border. Here, in a suite of exclamation points, we Robert Ludlum 1927– ©Michelle Rydercome finally face to face with Ulster Stewart Scarlett, turncoat, Nazi, gangster, international rotter, as he prepares to turn over his ...

Those magic words in a title: "connection," "transfer," "exchange." We know immediately where we stand before opening the book, and so it is in ["The Rhinemann Exchange"]…. Not the details of the plot, of course, but there has to be espionage, counterespionage, action, supermen types (even if supermen in reverse), complication of plot, double-dealing. "The Rhinemann Exchange" is going to be a paragon in the field. It has everything...