May 11, 2020
This assured contribution to the Jason Bourne franchise from Thriller Award–winner Freeman (Thief River Falls) opens with a 2019 newspaper account of a sniper shooting in Las Vegas, Nev., that killed dozens a year earlier, but it’s the 2020 assassination in New York City of Congresswoman Sofia Ortiz, as recounted through a series of live tweets, that triggers the main action. Bourne, identified in a tweet only as “an ex-government operative gone rogue,” is accused of killing Ortiz, who was scheduled to speak about a massive data hack and to introduce a new law to curb the excesses of big tech. Bourne once again finds himself on the run, “in the crosshairs of every intelligence agent on the planet.” The action races from sunny Nassau to the rainy Highlands of Scotland, where Bourne faces perhaps his most dangerous foe yet, the evil Medusa agent known as Miss Shirley. Freeman has a firm grasp of Bourne’s tangled background, plus the skills to keep the action front and center. Bourne fans will hope for an encore from this talented author. Agent: Sloan Harris, ICM.
June 1, 2020
Novelist Freeman nails the Ludlum style in the latest Jason Bourne adventure. Without apparent motive, a man with no known criminal history or mental illness opens fire on a Las Vegas crowd and slaughters 66 people. More than a year later, a New York congresswoman is murdered, shot in the neck. The congresswoman had been about to expose a large-scale data hacking scandal in big tech. The suspect is an "ex-government operative gone rogue" code-named Cain. That's the hero, Jason Bourne. Fans know that as Cain, he was a professional assassin before a gunshot wound stole all memory of his past. Treadstone, his former organization, believes he's out of control and wants him dead. Good luck with that, because "Bourne was a ghost. Impossible to kill." So Bourne agrees to meet secretly with a journalist in Quebec City who has written about the Vegas killings and is investigating the congresswoman's murder. Nothing goes right, of course. Later, Bourne agrees to find a connection between that killing and a mysterious organization called Medusa. What follows is plenty of well-plotted action of the bloodletting variety. The main threat to society is a software application called Prescix. People think it's cool because it predicts what they're going to do before they know it themselves. They don't realize that it's controlling what they're going to do. That is plausible, scary stuff, but for a real scare meet the superb villain Miss Shirley. She warns people, "at all times when we are together to call me Miss Shirley." That's in every sentence, with violations punishable by a bullet in the throat, even if she's just treated a guy to the best sex ever. The showdown between Bourne and Miss Shirley is one for the ages. Freeman's first Jason Bourne thriller is a treat for fans of the late Robert Ludlum.
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June 1, 2020
Freeman, a veteran author of psychological thrillers, turns in a solid performance in this new novel featuring Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne. This time out, Bourne is determined to unmask the killers of the woman he loved; the fact that the killers might be connected to Treadstone, the shadowy agency that (literally) created Bourne, is certainly an inconvenience, but readers who know Bourne will know that he won't let loyalties or his own past stand in his way. The writing is energetic, the story is well conceived and executed, and let's talk about suspense. While sticking broadly to the format established by the earlier Bourne novels, Freeman works a number of subtle variations, doing a very nice job of keeping us constantly guessing what's going to happen next. He keeps Bourne very much on his toes, and he breathes new life into a series that was?let's be honest?starting to feel a bit stale.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)