The Tristan Betrayal

Rating:
Summary: Solid but not spectacular
Review: As the years pass since the death of Robert Ludlum, it becomes less and less clear exactly how much Ludlum there actually is in the novels going out solely under his name. Tristan Betrayal clearly has the underpinnings of a Ludlum spy novel. At the same time, however, it does not contain the deep intricacies that were the hallmark of his earliest work. That said, this was still an enjoyable read. This book grabs the reader early as US Ambassador Stephen Metcalfe arrives in Moscow during the volatility of Russia in the early 1990s. The reader is then quickly taken back in time to occupied France in WWII. As the story unfolds, a young Metcalf is stationed in France as an intelligence agent. As the plot progresses, Metcalf must overcome physical and emotional challenges. Every so often the reader is transported back to the setting at the beginning of the book - Moscow in the early 1990s. While Ludlum aficionados may yearn for the old days, the Tristan Betrayal still is worth a quick read. It is solid, but not spectacular.

Rating:
Summary: cliched, cliched, and cliched
Review: fair warnig to the publisher: please stop cash-in ludlum so shamelessly. after the great writer died, all the books published under his name with or without co-authors suck big time. there's almost none of them decent enough worth reading. this is almost like a factory without quality control, book after book printed out by a single formatted software, automatically mix, reverse and change the names, places, plots....whatever you can think about and then a new book title and jacket design. did you guys outthere ever hear the 'same s..t, different day?' this could be used to ludlum's phoney books too: 'same s..t, different title.'
give it a rest, will you?

Rating:
Summary: What was that?
Review: I have read almost all of Mr. Ludlum's works and this one didn't feel like any of them. A rewiever below was comparing The Tristan Betrayal with The Sigma Protocol? Duh!! This book is not a Sigma and it's not a Prometheus, either. It lacks the Ludlum's trademark of fast paced action combined with high level of suspense and of course mystery. "My novels are complicated because real life is [sic]" said Robert Ludlum once. I haven't seen any of the complexity that we were so used to from his previous novels.

Rating:
Summary: A good read, but is it really Ludlum
Review: It had been quite a few years since I had read a Robert Ludlum book when I decided to by The Tristan Betrayal. It had all the elements of a Ludlum book (i.e. espionage, unexpected twist and turns, a multi-dimensional (and of course multi-lingual) hero, etc.) I was especially drawn by the time frame of the story. The story starts out during the time of the 1991 failed coup in Moscow, but most of the story takes place during early World War II. Ludlum (or the ghostwriter) periodically flashes back to 1991 while telling the story. While this wasn't the best Ludlum book that I've read, it certainly made for enjoyable reading.

Rating:
Summary: Hardly spine-tingling
Review: It has all the right elements: Nazi conspiracies, international intrigue, duplicity galore...but they simply don't gel together in the breathtaking way I've come to expect from a Ludlum novel. The back cover blurb about the August 1991 attempted coup in Moscow initially caught my attention, so I bought it and eagerly dug in. No suspense. No edge-of-my-seat anticipation. I remained quite firmly in my comfy chair. I repeated "there has got to be more about the coup in here somewhere" so often that it became a mantra to keep me from throwing the book away in frustration. There were about 20 pages worth of material on the coup. I could do better than that just by having watched it on CNN. Interesting book, yes. Worthy of the Robert Ludlum name? A most definite no. I noticed that the ghostwriter's name appears nowhere on/in the cover, nor on Amazon's entry. That should be a telling clue in itself.