The Parsifal Mosaic

by Robert Ludlum

A powerful, fast-paced thriller from the bestselling author of the Bourne series. Michael Havelock watched as his partner and lover, Jenna Karas, double agent, was gunned down by his own agency. There's nothing left for him but to get out, quit the game. Until, in one frantic moment on a crowded railway platform in Rome, Havelock sees Jenna. She's alive - and suddenly Havelock is a marked man, on the run from both US and Russian assassins. Racing around the globe after his beautiful betrayer, Havelock is trapped in a massive mosaic of treachery created by a top-level mole with the world in his fist - Parsifal...

Genres: Fiction, Thriller, Espionage, Mystery, Suspense, Adventure, Spy Thriller

760 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Robert Ludlum was the author of twenty-seven novels, each one a New York Times bestseller. There are more than 210 million of his books in print, and they have been translated into thirty-two languages. He is the author of The Scarlatti Inheritance, The Chancellor Manuscript, and the Jason Bourne series--The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, and The Bourne Ultimatum--among others. Mr. Ludlum passed away in March, 2001. Ludlum also published books under the pseudonyms Jonathan Ryder and Michael Shepherd.

Some of Ludlum's novels have been made into films and mini-series, including The Osterman Weekend, The Holcroft Covenant, The Apocalypse Watch, The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum. A non-Ludlum book supposedly inspired by his unused notes, Covert One: The Hades Factor, has also been made into a mini-series. The Bourne movies, starring Matt Damon in the title role, have been commercially and critically successful (The Bourne Ultimatum won three Academy Awards in 2008), although the story lines depart significantly from the source material.

Reviews

[Pierre Tassé (Enjoying Books) · Rating 4 out of 5]

THis book took me an extra long time as it was audio and lasted over 25 hours. BUT, it was fun and entertaining (Rick Brick the narrator) and Ludlum came through...so much that I am going for another one...Janson Directive.

[Anthony Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book I've read... I loved it! The action was original & exceeding through the thickening plot. Real Espionage at its finest, an international spycraft novel from the point of chow from an experienced operator with one of the Realest drives I've seen in a character...

Espionage at the highest lengths, spycraft at its finest!

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dec 2014 Reread.
STill love this a million times over. Admittedly there are things I skim when I'm reading something for the 20th (or more) time. But I love these characters, I love the clever espionage, and the mystery here is completely unique.


OLD: My very very very very favorite Ludlum book. I read these over and over again in high school and college, raiding my parents' library. I eventually had to start buying my own copies. This is definitely my favorite.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

One thing about Ludlum is that he doesn’t waste your time. Every scene is all business. I think that’s what set him apart from other thriller writers. You never get any extraneous, drawn-out scenes of “normality” before the plot kicks back in. The plot is always driving forward.

This novel is a little light on the action, but you’d hardly notice it. Ludlum is able to make page after page of conversational intrigue fascinating.

There’s some melodrama here, but not enough to become a turnoff. Yup, Havelock’s love was gunned down and then he sees her again, very much alive, as the back cover blurb tells us. So there’s a smattering of a lost love story and the anguish, oh the anguish. Who cares, the story rockets along anyway, 700 pages be damned.

Ludlum expertly describes the constant lying, the lies-within-lies, and the intellectualized justifications spies and government officials live under.

Man I love Ludlum. A totally unique voice in the spy thriller world. Put aside the dated elements (the President is never more than 50 feet away from a telephone, spies carry lots of spare change for the phone booths, and carbon paper is still a thing!) and roll with it. These novels should not be forgotten just because they seem to come from another world from 40 years ago. The energy in the prose will astound you, and it’s very difficult to guess what comes next.

[Seth · Rating 2 out of 5]

This novel was published in 1982, and it is the direct follow up in Mr.Ludlum's career to his legendary Bourne Identity novel. In future years, Mr.Ludlum would seemingly forget how to write character depth, but at the time of this novel he remembered to include depth for most of the stories characters. Some of the sequences are "cookie cutter" for this author, the first 200 pages of this book seemed so similar to the first 200 pages of Bourne Identity that I was debating if I was wasting my time, and later in the novel there is an unraveling mystery location which won't be unfamiliar in the least to those who have already read "Bourne Ultimatum" this location just happens to be on a different continent.

The conspiracy in this story is a bit "over-complicated" here is the summary of what it is about. Michael Havlock is a recently retired US covert agent, who decided to throw in the towel when he realized that his girlfriend was a double agent feeding information to the Soviets. He made arrangements for her assassination, but after it occurs on a spanish beach called "Costa Brava" he feels bad about it and deciders to retire. Except there is a problem... the assassination was a staged act, and his girlfriend was not actually killed. Why would this happen....?

That's where things get overly complicated, what it later boils down to is that there are two Soviet moles working deep inside the US State department. One goes by the code name "Parsifal" and the other "Ambiguity:" The protagonist Havlock had once had an ally in the US Secretary of State Anton Matthias, but now he can't seem to get Matthias on the phone? Why would that be?

Answer- Parsifal and Ambiguity have brainwashed the secretary of state to do their bidding, and they have gotten him to sign two aggression pacts with Russia and with China, each pact saying that they would team up with one to nuke the other if one of the two signing parties felt it was time to launch.

And here is where things start to get a bit grey for me... Maybe I'm just a product of my time, I was born the year this book was published. I am meant to understand that US-Russian relations "cooled down" in 1986 and finally hit a brave new world as the USSR collapsed in 1991 as a 9 year old sat pissed in front of the tv cause President HW Bush was on every station but that Urkle kid was nowhere to be found. (Anyway....)

If your around my age, you probably spent more time worrying that rogue nations like North Korea or terrorist groups would use Russian designed Nuclear weapons against us then you worried that the Russian Federation President would consciously launch a nuclear attack against the west. Although everybody knows China has many Nukes pointed at the US, and we do the same to them, you probably don't worry about this very much because inspite of any ideological differences we have with our biggest trading partner, they are just that, are greatest trading partner. We wouldn't be very happy campers if we didn't have their cheap merchandise to use, and they wouldn't be happy if they didn't have our money for these products initially, and then our money all over again as we pay inerest on debt money that we owe them. Point end point, I don't worry about the Chinese launching nukes against us, you shouldn't either. They are the greatest capitalist nation in the modern world, and they know that destroying us would be very bad for business.

But getting back to the subject matter of this novel... maybe things were different in 1982... Ludlum suggests the communist nations would launch upon reading the signature of the US secretary of state that he has secretly agreed to a launch pact. I just don't buy this, not today and probably not in 1982 either. I imagine that if one of the communist leaders was presented with such a document. Things would probably go something like this-

Chinese Premier- Hmm, this document is very very strange, I call Moscow and Washington, we see what's going on.

Russian Premier- Ah- Chairman Mao... Priveyet! i hear you call me about US document of Nuke pact. I have thee President Reagan on uh how you say... conference call let us see what's going on.

President Reagan- Chairman Mao, President Gorbachev, this is the Gipper here, and I understand you both feel very upset about this document you read that was signed by my former secretary of state General Doofachuck. Let me assure you, that he had no authority from me to sign any such document and I in no way encouraged him to do so. From what my advisers have told me he was coerced into signing by forces beyond his control and has since been placed in a mental institution. I hope you understand this has just been a big goof, these kinds of things happen and I hearby invalidate this document.

Russian Premier- I accept this apology by the US president and resign myself to vodka drinking. Dad Vidanya's commerades!

Chinese Premier- I accept too! But when we gonna play ping pong? I best player in all the world!

President Regan- Not today Mao, maybe my doctor will clear me next year, I am recovering from a gunshot wound ya know.

Chinese Premier- As yes, me so sorry! You feel well soon! Good bye!


So you see from this crude analogy, the terror factor just wasn't there for me in this novel, because the likely reaction Ludlum asks us to fear for just doesn't seem feasible. 2 stars for not being the worst Ludlum story I ever read, But by no means as logical as Bourne Identity either.

[Nafees Omar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Phew... So it took me almost 15 days to finish this book not because I'm a slow reader but but ... there are a lot of buts.

Mr. Ludlum feeds you with too many characters and leads you to too many events before the plot's build-up even begins, most of which caused me to put the book down on several occasions.

I don't know about others, but it seemed to me that he unnecessarily lengthened the buildup. I won't say the story was bad, but why feeding readers too many unnecessary pages, why making things so convoluted.

I liked what he tried to picture through this book, but not the way he did it. I would've really appreciated it if he were more concise. High expectations ended in disappointment. I don't know when is the next time I'm going to pick up another of his books.

[Kailash · Rating 3 out of 5]

After the disasters of 'Holcroft Covenant' and 'Chancellor Manuscript' Ludlum is back to somewhere near his best. This book is good because Ludlum sticks to what he does best - spies and their strategic games; leaving aside tedious politics and economics. The story is essentially just strategies, traps, moves & countermoves devised, executed and subsequently taken apart by the best of the spies in the Consular Operations and the VKR (a right-wing part of the KGB).

Micheal Havelock, our hero and the best secret agent of the Cons Ops, saw his love, Jenna Karas, die on a beach in Barcelona following what he thought was a betrayal. The shock is enough for him to exit the game. Then a chance glance at a crowded Rome train station changes everything. He realizes that she is, in fact, NOT dead. What follows is a really convoluted plot starting with Russian, French, Corsican & African agents and going all the way to the most powerful man on earth, the President of the United States. Throw in a Russian mole at the highest reaches of the State Department and the very real possibility of nuclear war involving the US, Russia & China, and we have an absolute humdinger of a book!

Ludlum writes as ever with an economy that makes his action seem very real. The pace is just nice, and the twists don't stop right to the end. A great read!

[Matt Crumpton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well i am glad I finally got this book read. It has taken me 4 or 5 times to sit down and read the entire thing. Well what did I think.......

In one word....CONVOLUTED! This book is so confusing. Really, when you get to the end and you have some idea what the story is about, you seem to think gee I could have made it much more coherent for the reader. The plot is so simple, and in my opinion a little weak. There is just so many words, and subplots and verbal beatings around the bush. I just felt like shouting "Get to the point Ludlum!" (note the exclamation point...its a favorite of Ludlums).

I felt the first half of the book is way better than the second half. At first its a pretty decent novel, but after hundreds of pages it just gets old. This book could have been 300 to 400 pages instead of almost 700.

why do I give it 3 stars? Well i guess I feel generous today, and in my own demented way I kind of like Ludlum. I should only give it 2 stars.

[Karl Jorgenson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ewwww. DNF after about 350 pages. I tried to read Ludlum once before, a few decades ago. Now his writing is dated as well as much-too-much. He does a nice job of creating action scenes: stalking, shoot-outs, ambushes, fights. But it gets to be too much: can our spy truly find allies in every square of every town of every country in the world? Also, are there enough bad guys to watch every port, airport, rental car, bus, train, and coffee shop? Ridiculous. Also the concept that spy agencies have their hooks into everything everywhere is ludicrous. Even so, I might have stuck with it if Ludlum had been able to write a novel-length novel. But no: the hero must go through a dozen impossible-to-survive battles to get to the person who starts him on a journey of a dozen more battles. Who's the big spy? I stopped caring. Why is the world threatened? I won't ever know because I didn't find a hint in 350 pages. As with Tom Clancy, an editor might have made something here.

[Charlie Ravioli · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very tangled story about moles, double agents, Russians and the CIA. Typical Ludlum in other words. The action was sprinkled throughout but maybe not enough. Maybe I've become a more mature reader (aka I'm getting old) or maybe this is just not one of Ludlum's better ones, but whatever the reason, I'm only giving it 3 stars. I think it was about 100-150 pages too long and it was just a little too cute in the end for my liking. The action was good but the espionage felt overdone. It's been a while since I read a Ludlum book (I used to read them all the time when I was in high school/college and I LOVED them). I still haven't read them all and I will pick up another one again but not too soon.

[itchy · Rating 4 out of 5]

titular sentence:
p444: "Ambassador Addison Brooks and General Malcolm Halyard," said Michael, reading a page that contained the names of all those involved--however remotely, with or without knowledge--with the Parsifal mosaic.

ocr errors:
p32: "...Maybe I'm fust saving out respective directors a lot of aggravation; that could be my objective...."

p33: "...You would have slept peacefully for the better part of tomorrow while a doctor insisted that your odd fever be stutdied at the hospital...."

p47: He thrust 2,000 lire on a woman heading into the lathes' room; 5,000 to a freight hand.

*more later*

It felt like I've read it before but will never be certain. Jenna Karas definitely rang a bell, which I first mistakenly took to be a character from Blatty's The Exorcist, haha.

[Fredrick Danysh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Double agent and partner Jenna Karas is gunned down by by Michael Havelock's agency. After spying her on a train platform and being hunted by both the United States and Russia, Michael sets out to find the truth

[Sharyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good read

[Trevor Denning · Rating 2 out of 5]

Third time was the charm for plodding through this conspiracy thriller. Cold War spy Michael Havelock wants out after killing his KGB double agent girlfriend Jenna. After a few weeks' retirement, where he is approached by spooks on both sides (making me wonder how great of a spy he could have been, if everyone knew him by sight), he catches a glimpse of Jenna in a train station. What follows is a chase from Europe to the US to find his true love.

The questions begin to stack up: Who wanted Michael out? Why wasn't he killed? Who is Parsifal and why is he into Mosaics? Following the answers, Michael uncovers a plot by a madman to bring the world to nuclear Armageddon (this is the Cold War after all, everything was always about nukes). Unfortunately, it's not as exciting as it sounds. Yeah, the plot has just the right amount of action and melodrama, but the telling is very talky. And to be honest, I'm still not sure why Michael wasn't killed, why Jenna's death was faked, or how they saved the world in 1982 from insane Kissinger.

[Rohan Sarkar · Rating 3 out of 5]

The second Ludlum book I read. After consulting several top 10 ludlum lists, this book figured in the top 5 in all of them. My main gripe with this book is that it is too similar to the Janus Directive, the previous Ludlum book I read. Though it easily trumps the Cry of the Halidon, the next book I am reading. As a thriller, it does not disappoint. Twists and turns abound. The central conflict of the book, of a hero who is led to believe his love has betrayed him and his country, is interesting enough to keep the reader invested. There is a plot point regarding the hero’s mentor which I found meh. Just didn’t do it for me. The last 250 pages ratchets the tension high enough and it kept me engrossed and I finished those 250 in a day. Overall, a good book.

[Cailyn Lloyd · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a reread of a favorite book, partly to see how well it held up over the years, and it was only okay. Ludlum is a masterful writer, and at times, this is a real page turner. But he is also wordy and his tone sounds dated. The Cold War trope is no longer interesting and many of the plot concepts just don't hold up. That one man, the Secretary of State, could be so revered, so powerful, sounds implausible, even for the era. I read them all at one time but I doubt I'll be revisiting these books again.

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

So this book took me a long time to finish, and I feel that I now fully understand the meaning of the word 'labyrinthine'! The first sections introduced large numbers of characters and forced me to create a cheat sheet just to keep up. The story was really long in the telling, and extraordinarily complicated and convoluted.
Overall disappointing, and certainly not one of Ludlum's better books...

[Kym Hamer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this when I was a teenager and I still do. Ludlum's plot questions the power behind those in power and he creates a cast of characters that weave about so much it left me wondering who would end up being the good or the bad guys. It's an intense read - so if you like fast-paced and fabulous, I'd highly recommend this.

[Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this was one of my top 2 favorite Robert Ludlum books. He is an awesome writer! Keeps me reading till my eyes are red and the sun is coming up!

[Michael Koch · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was first published in 1982. I read it in the 1980s and again in 2025. This is a true thriller in the style of the cold war era. Main-frame computers are present however immediate communications, drones and immediate access to worldwide information from every desk are not yet available in this period. The book begins with the tearing apart of a male and female agent couple trying to retire into the USA. A vicious and brutal attempt on her life results in her (assumed) killing and his departure from his agent role.

The two accidentally spot each other. Jenna is alive but believes that Michael was the instigator of the attempt on her life. A major section of the book finds Michael trying to find who really was behind the event. He begins to learn that his previous employer might be the instigator of the attempt on Jenna. He uses his previous skills to meet up with Jenna. Both share tactical information and determine that while US agents might be the active forces behind her close fright, they might have been given orders by a rogue senior player.

As they follow the faint trail left by the killers who tried to kill Jenna, they learn that they too are leaving trails. Ultimately, they meet with the US President. They learn that all US agents are attempting to unearth a unit that has stolen ultra secret nuclear information that can destroy the US, the USSR and China. If US agents find the antagonist team, destruction will begin.

During the last portion of the book, the protagonists search for the antagonist. They too are losing resources, making their efforts harder and harder. As all this was going on, there was stage setting by the antagonist. Some leaks were unearthed by both sides. There were so many actions, in so many locations, killing so many people, resulting in so many discussions regarding security that I found the whole thing somewhat tedious and repetitive.

There is no lack of action in this book. The last 60 to 100 pages is especially exciting and gripping. This shows Ludlum at the top of his game. It is also a good story with an interesting and novel plot. Four Stars.

[Kelly Sedinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a re-read for me, but it's been decades since I read it the first time. When I was a teenager I went on a BIG spy novel kick, and when I looked through Ludlum's list of titles the other day I was surprised to note how many of his books I actually read back in the day. I always liked his convoluted plots that at times barely seemed to make sense as his heroes and heroines descended into minutia, but there was always a big and cool concept there to tie it all together, and he always handled action scenes really well.

And to come back now, thirty years after I read this one the first time? It actually holds up pretty well! In contemporary tastes I suppose it would be considered WAY too complex and wordy. He has characters sitting around having conversations that go on for pages, and he'll also have some very long descriptive passages that will make you scream for him to get to the point. But the book is still engaging as hell with a cool inciting incident (a spy who saw his spy wife get killed on a beach, only to see her on a train platform in Rome a year or so later), and spy machinations galore. Secret meetings with signals sent by matchlight, moving through Europe via backchannels light unnamed freighters, double and triple crosses galore, shadowy enemy agents with sinister code-names...and it all takes place in the 1980s, pre-Internet and pre-cell phone, when if you desperately needed to call someone you had to get to a pay phone...and if you wanted it to be untraceable, you called from a pay phone and hung up after a few minutes and then called from another pay phone.

Back when I was on my big Ludlum phase, this was one of my favorites of his novels, and yes, it still holds up very nicely as a representative of its genre. I don't know that I plan to revisit a whole lot more of Ludlum's work (not because I don't want to, but because there's too much other stuff on my TBR). But I'm glad I returned to this one!

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting book, but probably a little too complicated for me.
Although I was interested in the book, I was not eager to drop other things just to read it like usual.
Actually, it took me so long to read it because... it took too much mental energy to process what I was reading and understand everything that is going on??? Honestly, I don't know. That's probably it.
I didn't have a problem with the writing style or anything like that. I think it was just the content. I'm not very good with understanding legal talk or political/international affairs. Unfortunately for me, that is what the plot circles around. Hence the "complicated" read. I knew this going in, but I didn't think it was going to be such deep waters.
I should mention that there were a lot of characters and some so brief that I only had a vague idea who they were or what their impact was to the storyline when they reappeared. Although, this is partly my own fault for not reading on a regular basis. Admittedly, I did drop the book at one point, but I just took a break to enjoy the outdoors for a while. (I never read anything else while I had this book on the go.) Of course that break didn't make the read any easier and added to my struggle to understand the whole thing.
I have another book by this author that I'll read later in the year and we shall see if I have similar findings. It's fine if a book makes me think and has a lot of depth, but it's a different story when it surrounds subjects you already struggle with in the real world.
That being said, others who don't enjoy that political world stuff or live under a rock like me, will not likely find this book very captivating either.
However, someone who does enjoy that stuff and doesn't need an interpreter to simplify things, will probably find some magic in this book.

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked it, I think. An overly complicated story with about 200 pages of misused space still offers a decent story, likable characters, and Ludlum's typical penchant for thriller/espionage panache. The hardcover edition is two pages shy of 600 and the typeface size reminds me of a Bible which makes this a slog to get through.

The reality of the situation is that this particular story is a thinly veiled romance. Michael Havelock, an entrenched governmental asset to the United States, leaves his notoriously dangerous job when he finds out the love of his life, Jenna Karas, is gunned down before his eyes since it had been discovered by him and others that she'd been knee deep in Soviet spy work and had been lying to Michael since their first fateful meeting. Thrown immediately into his world of depression and sadness, we find the newly unemployed Michael travelling the world through cities he had not been able to see with tourist eyes, but rather as a government's paranoid agent, lamenting his loss. That is, until he sees Jenna Karas get off a train. Convinced his eyes aren't playing tricks on him, especially because she flees at the sight of him, he embarks on a chase to not only find her, but also to discover why her death was planned, orchestrated, and ultimately faked.

Love story ensues.

But, also, a lot of twists and turns which keeps us on our toes, relatively speaking. Again, this is a massive tome of a novel, and it took me a lot of effort to keep myself engaged between thrilling narrative fixtures. Mostly, I feel, it's because this was unnecessarily complex for the story Ludlum eventually tells.

[Matt Kelland · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved Ludlum when I was younger. Thirty years later, I find him tedious, tortuous, and far, far too long. I persevered all the way to the end, and probably shouldn't have bothered.

The plot is stupidly complex. Everything is a cover-up, a feint, or a deception. Everything's part of a massive, labyrinthine, absurdly intricate conspiracy that gets more and more elaborate. And in the end, the ultimate bad guys are just caricature villains who are quite happy to destroy the entire world to show the superiority of their side's ideology. And while our hero is happy to lie and deceive everyone, if anyone else does it, that's proof that they're untrustworthy and deserve to die. It's Cold War paranoia taken to extremes.

It takes a whopping 450 pages before you actually get to the meat of the story. Until then, we're just blundering around trying to figure out what's going on. And then there's still another 200+ pages to go. Maybe if it were half the length, it would have worked.

Le Carre and Deighton did this much, much better.

[Malachi Antal · Rating 3 out of 5]

the Czech bunny, Jenna, is a rather underrated anti-heroine in page-turner tome.



the backdrop tale for the protagonist right around p. 100 is excellent.

the Apache aka the gunslinger is a good foil to someone mightn't've placed 'beyond salvage' in the writer's vernacular.

the Bourne Identity is favourite Ludlum book so far, the Matarese Circle also good with familiar plotline of agent being placed 'beyond salvage' by federal government he works under.

utilization of the fictive Soviet gun a Graz-Burya semiautomatic pistol is another trademark.



makes readership wonder why the espiocrat desires serving a country with capabilities of seeing the spy as an enemy at the drop of a hat.

[Filip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Until now, my knowledge of Ludlum's books was limited to his most famous creation: the Bourne Trilogy. What do you mean it's not a trilogy anymore? Nevermind. To be honest I am not exactly a fan of it, I haven't even read the final (by that I mean 'third') volume.

This was much, much better. It was a perfect mixture of action and less glamorous parts of spycraft - sifting through files, tailing someone and such. It was also set in Cold War era which, without the modern technologies is, in my opinion, a much more interesting setting for a spy novel. The characters were well-written and realistic and the different layers of mystery and the frequent changes in alliances felt realistic and interesting. The only thing I didn't like were the stakes, as the main plot felt a bit... too... dunno... absurd?

But a really, really good one.

[Andrew Keen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cold War-era spy novel in which a jaded ex-spy is pulled back in to resolve the mystery of how his murdered lover has been seen alive again. The first third of the book is ordinary for spy novels; the action picks up in the middle of the book. Ludlum employs a different approach in that the reader is an observer to conversations that reference events that the reader has not witnessed. In that respect the first person view is realistic but hard to follow. The story is heavy on dialogue, and sometimes so many characters are present you lose track of who is speaking. The moral of the story is that government and society ought not to make idols of our leaders, for what catastrophes might occur when these leaders lose their senses? In this case, potentially a Doomsday pact for annihilation.

[Joseph Meza · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this had a good story somewhere in the near 600 pages that it was. The plot took way too long to come together and when it finally did it seemed that it was rushed and extremely complicated to put together. There is also the huge cast of characters that you have to keep up with (reminds me of Tom Clancy) that for this reader seemed unnecessary. The narrative sometimes felt to just drag on it really got a bit boring in spots. I love a good spy/espionage book but this one seemed to keep going with almost no end in sight. I really felt this was about a 3.5 ⭐ than a 3 ⭐ and honestly was a bit disappointed that a good plot could be ruined with too many words.

[Niranjan Limaye · Rating 4 out of 5]

The mystery is complicated and the book tooo long for a thriller (close to 750 pages). But Ludlum gives the aura of someone who knows the State Department, the CIA and all their machinations too well. He spends time (and words, lotsa them) on describing, developing his characters. And the tale does span Moscow, Paris, Rome, Spain and Washington.

If the mid-level CIA protagonist appears little too 'all knowing, always correct, most athletic, best combatant and highly perceptive with enormous detection skills', just blame it on Ludlum's love for his hero and try to enjoy the thriller.

[Russell Miles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Robert Ludlum had a tendency to be long winded, and this book is the perfect example; it is very wordy.

The concept and the plots were ingeniously set, but it was just too much of the other stuff that I didn't like.

I like action, suspenseful, thrillers, but it took me a long time to read the book because the description in the book is very intricate and detailed.

I'm sure in the 70s people were glued to everything he wrote, but now I have better things to do. Again, another place, another time.