The legacy is not just Jason Bourne's in this 4th installment of the masterspy's adventures but that of his creator, Robert Ludlum, who died last year after writing three Bourne novels, the last being The Bourne Ultimatum. After two movie deals, the Ludlum estate no doubt realized the gold in them thar yarns and has given Eric Van Lustbader the commission to carry on the series and the excitement.

The moviegoing public is now learning about the extraordinary agent and his ability to operate in the world of covert-ops with a serious loss of memory--a situation that doesn't allow him to distinguish the good guys of his past from the bad guys who are trying to terminate him while justifying their intended assassination by falsely accusing Bourne of being a rogue agent.

A deep moral underpinning guides him in his new life, which makes his own training and killing skills frightening. Wanting to escape his destructive ways, even in the name of self defense, he has adopted his birth name, David Webb, and has deeply hidden his existence. As "... Legacy begins, he's a husband and father teaching Eastern Studies at Georgetown University. But enemies that continue to lurk in the shadow world of powerful politicians and corrupt officials catch up to him. When Khan, a new assassin on the scene, attacks him with skills that are equal to his own and when he's framed for the murder of his two closest associates, professor David Webb turns back, with great reluctance, to his CIA operative, Bourne.

Lustbader carries on the tradition of Ludlum's wide-ranging and relentlessly deadly threats, adding emotional pain to his 3-dimensional hero when Kahn claims to be Bourne's son--thought to have died in a Cambodia river with Bourne's first wife and daughter--and shows him evidence. While trying to manage that emotional bombshell, Bourne goes through the kinds of action and death-defying escapes that action movie directors feed on, practically assuring that this will be the subject of a fourth in the film series, as well. The exploits lead to a climax in Reykyavik, the site of a summit of world leaders where a power-hungry megalomaniac fronting as a philanthropist intends to achieve a new level of lethality and world domination with a mysterious, new biological weapon codenamed "NX-20."

Bourne gets beaten and tortured, dragged down by his personal demons and life-threatening injuries, but uncanny powers of recuperation keep him ahead just enough to remain in the fast-paced game that this secret agent personifies.