This third book finds Bourne again on the trail of the Jackal and follows him from the Caribbean to France and to Russia. It introduces the new Medusa organisation that has known mutated from a Vietnam assassination squad to a corporate octopus taking over companies across the world. The two strands are intertwined to add to the basic storyline.

The book does run out of steam. You get the idea that good editing could have removed about a third of the book. Carlos makes escapes that are clearly there to extend the story. You get the feeling that Ludlum was being paid by the page or word in some respects.

However this is still a good, if over long, thriller that does hit the right spots. However, compared to the other books, you do come away feeling unfulfilled. As his career progressed you felt that Ludlum sometimes revisited previous stories and wrote sequels to satisfy the fans. Sometimes this was not the wisest move and this is one on them.

Definitely one for the fans but new readers should read the first two.

Formulaic
Review date: 2004-07-30 Rating: 4 out of 10

I found the first two books in the Jason Bourne series quite entertaining. They were well written and clearly well researched. Ulysses they're not, but the stories kept you reading, plots intertwining with sub-plots in an imaginative and engaging manner.
Unfortunately the Bourne Ultimatum is more than a little disappointing. It starts out quite well, however one cannot shake the feeling that Robert Ludlum was either compelled by contract to produce a third book, or simply decided to cash-in by milking the idea one more time. By the time you get to the closing chapters the book has descended into surrealism, with inane twists to keep flogging the long deceased horse. By the time I finished it, I could not stop thinking that this was hacked together from rejected scripts for Hart To Hart, or some other banal tv nonsense.
If you've read the first two books in the series, its probably worth a glance, but don't expect too much.