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Ο αιφνίδιος θάνατος ενός Αμερικανού γερουσιαστή, υποψήφιου για το προεδρικό χρίσμα, στην αγκαλιά της όμορφης ερωμένης του, στέλνει τον καλύτερό του φίλο, Τρέισι Ρίχτερ, σε μια αποστολή αυτοκτονίας στην καρδιά της καμποτζιανής ζούγκλας, με σκοπό την ανακάλυψη και την τιμωρία των δολοφόνων.
Με όπλο την πείρα του από την πολύχρονη δράση του ως μυστικού πράκτορα, αλλά και από τον πόλεμο το Βιετνάμ, ο Ρίχτερ χώνεται όλο και πιο βαθιά στη σκοτεινή συνωμοσία που έχει εξυφάνει ένας μεγαλέμπορος όπλων με βρώμικο παρελθόν - και ακόμα πιο βρόμικο παρόν - αποφασισμένος να εκδικηθεί το θάνατο του φίλου του. Κι όταν συναντάει το εκτελεστικό όργανο των συνομωτών, έναν παρανοϊκό δολοφόνο, η μάχη θα είναι μέχρι θανάτου..
Με όπλο την πείρα του από την πολύχρονη δράση του ως μυστικού πράκτορα, αλλά και από τον πόλεμο το Βιετνάμ, ο Ρίχτερ χώνεται όλο και πιο βαθιά στη σκοτεινή συνωμοσία που έχει εξυφάνει ένας μεγαλέμπορος όπλων με βρώμικο παρελθόν - και ακόμα πιο βρόμικο παρόν - αποφασισμένος να εκδικηθεί το θάνατο του φίλου του. Κι όταν συναντάει το εκτελεστικό όργανο των συνομωτών, έναν παρανοϊκό δολοφόνο, η μάχη θα είναι μέχρι θανάτου..
635 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
9 people are currently reading
419 people want to read
About the author
Eric Van Lustbader
168 books1,228 followersEric Van Lustbader was born and raised in Greenwich Village. He is the author of more than twenty-five best-selling novels, including The Ninja, in which he introduced Nicholas Linnear, one of modern fiction's most beloved and enduring heroes. The Ninja was sold to 20th CenturyFox, to be made into a major motion picture. His novels have been translated into over twenty languages.
Mr. Lustbader is a graduate of Columbia College, with a degree in Sociology. Before turning to writing full time, he enjoyed highly successful careers in the New York City public school system, where he holds licenses in both elementary and early childhood education, and in the music business, where he worked for Elektra Records and CBS Records, among other companies.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/ericva...
Mr. Lustbader is a graduate of Columbia College, with a degree in Sociology. Before turning to writing full time, he enjoyed highly successful careers in the New York City public school system, where he holds licenses in both elementary and early childhood education, and in the music business, where he worked for Elektra Records and CBS Records, among other companies.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/ericva...
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
September 29, 2010
Detail—I loved the detail in this book. Van Lustbader clearly has OCD; he's obsessive and compulsive when it comes to martial arts, sex and technology. It's all described with amazing detail—fight scenes are littered with so much technical information that one assumes he is a practitioner of ai ki do and i ai do, for example. Sex scenes are so detailed that your average teenage boy (as I was when I first read it) would devour every word many times over before reaching... the inevitable climax scene. And although it was written in the 80's, Van Lustbader thrusts the reader into a hidden world where sleazy crime nobodies collide with ultra high tech US military and mysterious Asian power brokers.
The cast of characters is huge. Van Lustbader seeks your patience as he meticulously reveals a very big global stage upon which he gradually introduces a vast number of characters. Adding to this confusion/depth (this depends on your attitude and what side of the bed you wake up on, I guess), he unfolds the story to you at different points in time and indeed, history, skipping backwards and forwards between present day New York/Washington, Cambodia under the iron-fisted rule of the Khmer Rouge as he rounds out the history, bad blood and motivations of all of the characters who are meticulously interwoven with one-another. Lead Character Tracey Richter is a flawed yet powerful man with a horrific past; respected, revered, despised and feared within many circles. He is led on a global roller coaster ride where he must balance death and destruction with managing his, at times, tenuous relationship with his girlfriend, Lauren. I developed a man-crush on Richter as a kid and I still have it today. He's warm tender and caring—he's very vulnerable. Then in an instant he's a heaving mass of testosterone fuelled machine, crushing bone (in absolute, visceral detail) and dealing out pain like he is the patron saint of hell.
The book is filled with so many clichés that a lot of readers will be turned off by it. But if you're a fan martial arts and action/adventure and technology, or you're a 15 year old lad with plenty of "me time", I highly recommend this book to you.
The cast of characters is huge. Van Lustbader seeks your patience as he meticulously reveals a very big global stage upon which he gradually introduces a vast number of characters. Adding to this confusion/depth (this depends on your attitude and what side of the bed you wake up on, I guess), he unfolds the story to you at different points in time and indeed, history, skipping backwards and forwards between present day New York/Washington, Cambodia under the iron-fisted rule of the Khmer Rouge as he rounds out the history, bad blood and motivations of all of the characters who are meticulously interwoven with one-another. Lead Character Tracey Richter is a flawed yet powerful man with a horrific past; respected, revered, despised and feared within many circles. He is led on a global roller coaster ride where he must balance death and destruction with managing his, at times, tenuous relationship with his girlfriend, Lauren. I developed a man-crush on Richter as a kid and I still have it today. He's warm tender and caring—he's very vulnerable. Then in an instant he's a heaving mass of testosterone fuelled machine, crushing bone (in absolute, visceral detail) and dealing out pain like he is the patron saint of hell.
The book is filled with so many clichés that a lot of readers will be turned off by it. But if you're a fan martial arts and action/adventure and technology, or you're a 15 year old lad with plenty of "me time", I highly recommend this book to you.
August 14, 2023
Guvernatorul John Holmgren candidează la președenție alături de mana lui dreapta si prietenul cel mai bun Tracy Richter. Intr-o noapte el își înșală nevasta cu Moira și este omorât în plin act sexual. Tracy crede ca a avut un atac de cord și face ca toată tărășenia sa dispară foarte repede. Detectivul Douglas Ralph Thwaite nu se lasă intimidat de Richter și dorește sa investigheze moartea guvernatorului în continuare. O carte plină de suspans, cu multe personaje si răsturnări de situație din înaltă societate din SUA si China.
August 29, 2017
Loved this book - it's quite an epic with very well-developed characters and a storyline that spans decades. I enjoy books I can sink my teeth into and that I can't put down, and this was one of them. As with many books authored by Eric Van Lustbader, it's an interesting blend of east-meets-west when it comes to martial arts and oriental culture.
October 16, 2021
Great thriller. You finish it with the stink of Cambodia in your nostrils.
March 17, 2021
Eric Van Lustbader stormed onto the bestseller charts in 1980 with the publication of The Ninja, a dark, sophisticated, pulpy thriller that perfectly anticipated the obsession with ninjas and all things Japanese in the 1980s. With that novel, Van Lustbader established the elements of a formula that he would cash in on for more than a decade: a Western protagonist schooled in Eastern martial arts, a sinister super-assassin from the East, a global conspiracy rooted in historical events spanning East and West, a strong undercurrent of Eastern mysticism and mythology, martial arts violence, explicit sex, dark psychology, intense romance, and a melodramatic writing style that tries to elevate all of this to high literature. I have to admit, I am a sucker for this formula.
Van Lustbader’s second novel in this vein, Black Heart , published in 1983, is perhaps his most ambitious. It’s a very long (700 pages), complex narrative with numerous threads and characters that span Cambodia in the early 1960s to the USA in the early 1980s, by way of the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge reign of terror. It begins with the assassination of the governor of New York during the throes of sexual passion by a mystic assassin named Khieu. It so happens that the close friend and political advisor of the victim is a man named Tracy Richter, an ex-Special Forces soldier and ex-member of a clandestine outfit called “the foundation”. When Richter is informed that the foundation suspects the governor didn’t die of a heart attack, but was in fact assassinated, he takes it upon himself to solve the mystery and track down the culprit.
As the story unfolds, we learn that there’s a sinister network call the “angka” originating with U.S. Special Forces in the Cambodian jungle that by the early 1980s has infiltrated the highest corridors of power in D.C. Among the angka’s leaders are the head of a corporation that develops advanced weapons systems, a senator who is a leading presidential candidate and hardline anti-terrorist, and the director of the CIA. These men are involved in an all-too-plausible conspiracy: secretly sponsoring terrorist attacks around the world in an effort to rise to power on a tough anti-terrorist platform. They also have connections to Richter, the foundation, and various other players in a way that makes everything very personal.
The main character of this tale is really the assassin Khieu; in addition to his lethal present-day operations as as assassin for the angka, we get many flashbacks to his experiences in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge’s brutal rise to power. Van Lustbader explores how a man who began as a humble Buddhist with humanitarian ideals could turn into a murderous revolutionary and finally an almost inhuman mystical assassin. It’s an intriguing look into the “black heart” of his antagonist—one of Van Lustbader’s biggest strengths as a writer.
By the last quarter of the book there are so many plot threads running that you almost need a spreadsheet to keep track of them—old vendettas, political agendas, terrorist plots, criminal enterprises, police investigations, romantic dramas, spiritual traumas, family honor—but they all converge toward the novel’s end in a suitably dark, violent and mystical climax.
One of the most interesting aspects of this novel for the student of shadow warfare is how Van Lustbader anticipates the “War on Terror” 20 years in advance. The senator’s plan to attack terrorists worldwide, invade Islamic countries, take their oil and ensure America’s global dominance sounds eerily similar to the program that “neoconservatives” would roll out after 9/11/2001. Black Heart offers a neocon conspiracy that will make “9/11 was an inside job” conspiracy theorists nod in understanding.
In many ways this novel is a re-telling of The Ninja, with a Cambodia/Vietnam War backstory instead of a Japan/World War II one, the dramatic opening assassination of a VIP, the discovery by the shadow operator protagonist of foul play involving an Eastern killing technique, the detective work with a gruff New York cop to identify the assassin, the uncovering of a vast conspiracy by Western industrialists and politicians, the love interest who gets caught up in the plot, the twisted mysticism, horrific violence and extreme sexuality of the villains. Like I said, this was Van Lustbader’s formula in the 1980s—it’s ambitious, intense stuff, though at times over-written, implausible, melodramatic and pornographic. He easily could have trimmed a hundred pages off this novel and made it a tighter read, but in an era when Stephen King, Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy were at the top of the bestseller charts, these fat, complex thrillers were all the rage. And once in a while, if they’re well done, they’re fun to read. Black Heart is well done; it’s 1980s Van Lustbader at his most epic. If the style is to your taste, you should enjoy this novel.
Van Lustbader’s second novel in this vein, Black Heart , published in 1983, is perhaps his most ambitious. It’s a very long (700 pages), complex narrative with numerous threads and characters that span Cambodia in the early 1960s to the USA in the early 1980s, by way of the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge reign of terror. It begins with the assassination of the governor of New York during the throes of sexual passion by a mystic assassin named Khieu. It so happens that the close friend and political advisor of the victim is a man named Tracy Richter, an ex-Special Forces soldier and ex-member of a clandestine outfit called “the foundation”. When Richter is informed that the foundation suspects the governor didn’t die of a heart attack, but was in fact assassinated, he takes it upon himself to solve the mystery and track down the culprit.
As the story unfolds, we learn that there’s a sinister network call the “angka” originating with U.S. Special Forces in the Cambodian jungle that by the early 1980s has infiltrated the highest corridors of power in D.C. Among the angka’s leaders are the head of a corporation that develops advanced weapons systems, a senator who is a leading presidential candidate and hardline anti-terrorist, and the director of the CIA. These men are involved in an all-too-plausible conspiracy: secretly sponsoring terrorist attacks around the world in an effort to rise to power on a tough anti-terrorist platform. They also have connections to Richter, the foundation, and various other players in a way that makes everything very personal.
The main character of this tale is really the assassin Khieu; in addition to his lethal present-day operations as as assassin for the angka, we get many flashbacks to his experiences in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge’s brutal rise to power. Van Lustbader explores how a man who began as a humble Buddhist with humanitarian ideals could turn into a murderous revolutionary and finally an almost inhuman mystical assassin. It’s an intriguing look into the “black heart” of his antagonist—one of Van Lustbader’s biggest strengths as a writer.
By the last quarter of the book there are so many plot threads running that you almost need a spreadsheet to keep track of them—old vendettas, political agendas, terrorist plots, criminal enterprises, police investigations, romantic dramas, spiritual traumas, family honor—but they all converge toward the novel’s end in a suitably dark, violent and mystical climax.
One of the most interesting aspects of this novel for the student of shadow warfare is how Van Lustbader anticipates the “War on Terror” 20 years in advance. The senator’s plan to attack terrorists worldwide, invade Islamic countries, take their oil and ensure America’s global dominance sounds eerily similar to the program that “neoconservatives” would roll out after 9/11/2001. Black Heart offers a neocon conspiracy that will make “9/11 was an inside job” conspiracy theorists nod in understanding.
In many ways this novel is a re-telling of The Ninja, with a Cambodia/Vietnam War backstory instead of a Japan/World War II one, the dramatic opening assassination of a VIP, the discovery by the shadow operator protagonist of foul play involving an Eastern killing technique, the detective work with a gruff New York cop to identify the assassin, the uncovering of a vast conspiracy by Western industrialists and politicians, the love interest who gets caught up in the plot, the twisted mysticism, horrific violence and extreme sexuality of the villains. Like I said, this was Van Lustbader’s formula in the 1980s—it’s ambitious, intense stuff, though at times over-written, implausible, melodramatic and pornographic. He easily could have trimmed a hundred pages off this novel and made it a tighter read, but in an era when Stephen King, Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy were at the top of the bestseller charts, these fat, complex thrillers were all the rage. And once in a while, if they’re well done, they’re fun to read. Black Heart is well done; it’s 1980s Van Lustbader at his most epic. If the style is to your taste, you should enjoy this novel.
February 11, 2018
765 pages
December 5, 2024
This was just was too long and too wordy and too many characters to keep track of for me. Some aspects were cool. The action was great and I found the cultural aspects interesting.
July 21, 2025
Tremendous!
**** 4 Stars.
**** 4 Stars.
May 15, 2012
ISBN 0449202704 - Written in 1982, there are some interesting parallels to current US politics - such as: "Gentlemen, we have seen all too often in recent years the escalation of incidents of terrorism against the United States of America in Iran, West Germany, Egypt and Peru... And I say to you now, our time is soon coming." This part of the book is well done - one man, using the fear of acts of terrorism on American soil, plans to build and control a puppet government. Had this been the whole book, it would probably deserve a better rating.
Unfortunately, the book is somewhat confusing at first, jumping from the 1960s in Cambodia to the present day (1980s) in the US, with characters whose paths crossed and whose names are somewhat similar (Kim and Kheiu; Sampang and Sokha). Until the author gets around to defining their personalities better, it's just a phonetic distraction. Character development is given less ink than pornographic sex scenes and boring blow-by-blow fights for a majority of the book.
It's remarkably hard to care about most characters and since most of them are dead by the end, it's hardly worth the effort anyway. Harder to understand is the return of Lauren to Tracy Richter's life and how they're proclaiming their love almost instantly. If this is a carry over from a previous novel, it will make sense only if you've read both, which I haven't; otherwise, it's a little romance-novel-ish. Ultimately, Black Heart isn't really good for much - readers looking for the porn parts will be let down by the sheer volume of other junk they have to get through to find them; if you're looking for the fight scenes, the intrigue, the romance, same problem - it's all there, but this book is trying so hard to be a little of everything that it doesn't amount to much of anything. A bad book can still be readable, but bad AND long? Too much effort, too little payoff.
- AnnaLovesBooks
Unfortunately, the book is somewhat confusing at first, jumping from the 1960s in Cambodia to the present day (1980s) in the US, with characters whose paths crossed and whose names are somewhat similar (Kim and Kheiu; Sampang and Sokha). Until the author gets around to defining their personalities better, it's just a phonetic distraction. Character development is given less ink than pornographic sex scenes and boring blow-by-blow fights for a majority of the book.
It's remarkably hard to care about most characters and since most of them are dead by the end, it's hardly worth the effort anyway. Harder to understand is the return of Lauren to Tracy Richter's life and how they're proclaiming their love almost instantly. If this is a carry over from a previous novel, it will make sense only if you've read both, which I haven't; otherwise, it's a little romance-novel-ish. Ultimately, Black Heart isn't really good for much - readers looking for the porn parts will be let down by the sheer volume of other junk they have to get through to find them; if you're looking for the fight scenes, the intrigue, the romance, same problem - it's all there, but this book is trying so hard to be a little of everything that it doesn't amount to much of anything. A bad book can still be readable, but bad AND long? Too much effort, too little payoff.
- AnnaLovesBooks
May 25, 2010
A long sordid tale filled with a lot of twists and turns. It carries an oriental spirit well that is not easily conveyed on the written page. I now also know more about the Khmer Rouge than I cared to know. The book was well researched and storylines not easily predictable. The tale could have used a better proofreader prior to publishing, but the story made the various typos and snafus worth looking past. Most telling however is the tale could have stood on its own without the occasional sexual interludes. Murder, blood, and mayhem levels are well within my standards. Definitely an eerie story. =)
February 17, 2015
عذه الروايا تجذبك الي عالم خيالي عالم الفردوس وسكانه الذين يعتقدون انهم يعيشون في فردوس السملء حيث قصة حب لا تباركها تقاليد المجتمع الطبقي ا كواهن تدفعه الشكوك لمواجهة ما حاسمة مع ما يومن به الناس
عذه الروايا تجذبك الي عالم خيالي عالم الفردوس وسك��نه الذين يعتقدون انهم يعيشون في فردوس السملء حيث قصة حب لا تباركها تقاليد المجتمع الطبقي ا كواهن تدفعه الشكوك لمواجهة ما حاسمة مع ما يومن به الناس
عذه الروايا تجذبك الي عالم خيالي عالم الفردوس وسك��نه الذين يعتقدون انهم يعيشون في فردوس السملء حيث قصة حب لا تباركها تقاليد المجتمع الطبقي ا كواهن تدفعه الشكوك لمواجهة ما حاسمة مع ما يومن به الناس
December 28, 2009
Another hero by Lustbader. No letdown in plot, setting, or action. Similar to Jason Bourne, Nicholas Linnear, and Jake Maroc, but DIFFERENT. This time he takes you on a mission from New York to the ancient ruins of Cambodia on the trail of international assassins.
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October 8, 2008A Lus
June 20, 2010
This book is slightly different from his previous series. This is a mystery of sorts. Still a decent read but not similar enough to his other works to keep me entertained.
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January 28, 2015Updatee
January 28, 2015
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February 5, 2015
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January 30, 2015
SANITTTYYYYYYYYYYYYY
January 30, 2015
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February 15, 2016
Good. I read this as a teenager and loved it. Re-read it and it wasn't as good but still enjoyable.
February 5, 2015
test123 09.24
February 16, 2015
688 to 689 rate and review
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews