The Ambler Warning
A Novel
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
"Welcome to Robert Ludlum's world...fast pacing, tight plotting, international intrigue." — Cleveland Plain Dealer
In Robert Ludlum's The Ambler Warning, an agent breaks out of a top-security institution where the government has kept him drugged for years only to discover that he's not the person he thinks he is.
On Parrish Island, a restricted island off the coast of Virginia, is a little-known and never-visited psychiatric facility. There, far from prying eyes, the government stores former intelligence employees whose psychiatric states make them a danger to their own government, people whose ramblings might endanger ongoing operations or prove dangerously inconvenient. One of these employees, former Consular Operations agent Hal Ambler, is kept heavily medicated and closely watched. But there's one difference between Hal and the other patients - Hal isn't crazy. With the help of a sympathetic nurse, Hal manages to clear his mind of the drug-induced haze and then pulls off a daring escape.
Now he's out to discover who stashed him here and why - but the world he returns to isn't the one he remembers. Friends and longtime associates don't remember him, there are no official records of Hal Ambler, and, when he first sees himself in the mirror, the face that looks back at him is not the one he knows as his own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For some bestselling authors, death is no impediment to an enduring career. But the latest Ludlum (d. 2001) novel, penned by an unnamed hired hand, reveals the problems inherent in such an arrangement: neither sufficiently like Ludlum's originals nor compellingly distinctive, it inhabits a kind of thriller purgatory to which only the most dedicated Ludlumite will be eager to venture. After a two-decade career as a clandestine operative, Hal Ambler is drugged and warehoused in the Parrish Island Psychiatric Facility, a government nuthouse for spies. A sympathetic nurse aids his escape, and soon Ambler is on the run, trying to figure out who he is and, more importantly, who he was. There are a few interesting characters particularly CIA accountant Clayton Caston, a man who knows little about feelings but who can tease a mountain of information out of a spy's expense account but the villains are mostly invisible and everybody else ends up dead before you really get to know them. Just because a writer can copy what was once a successful style does not automatically assure his publisher a successful book.
