ROBERT LUDLUM’S THE PARIS OPTION

Third in the late Ludlum’s co-authored paperback original series centered on Covert-One and begun with Ludlum/Lynds’s The Hades Factor (2000) and the Ludlum/ Philip Shelby The Cassandra Compact (2001). In Paris, Dr. Emile Chambord of the Pasteur Institute successfully finishes his research into a DNA computer faster than all the chips on earth put together. When terrorists—if they are terrorists—blow up the Institute, Chambord disappears. Meanwhile, the satellite network monitoring all Western bombers over Europe and all AWACS, P-3 Orion, and U-2 aircraft crashes for five minutes before returning onscreen. Lt. Col. Jon Smith, agent of Covert-One, is sent to Paris to find Dr. Chambord and discovers that the doctor has not only vanished but his beautiful daughter, Thérèse, has been kidnapped from her fancy digs. Dare we say that the threat of nuclear holocaust puts “civilization as we know it” in the balance? Hey, with Afterlife Author Robert Ludlum at the keyboard, why hold back? As with The Hades Factor, Lynds offers cloth-of-velvet moods and descriptive passages of various European cities, medicating much of Bipolar Bob’s multidimensional paranoid sensibility.

Tops in the series. Keep those particles streaming, Bob.