Finished reading Robert Ludlum’s ‘The Ambler Warning’ today.
This was one of the last books the Ludlum had near completion before his death in 2001, following which his family had a ghost writer finish up the manuscript allowing it to be published.
The premise of the story is that Hal Ambler a former HVA (High Value Agent) is locked in an asylum for agents who have mentally snapped, but pose a threat to national security as there’s no knowing what state secrets they may expose. The twist to this is that Hal isn’t insane. Throughout most of the book you follow Hal as he escapes the Asylum and tries to find out why he’d been locked up in the first place.
As each of his sources seemingly draw a blank at first, he starts to doubt if he is sane or not. That is until after a failed attempt on his life, which makes the start of his involvement in schemes of a much larger scale.
Much like the Bourne Identity the reader gets to learn about Hal as he searches through various links of what he can remember, often with a flashback of a single operation he was a part of in Asia roughly two years before his escape. Each flashback is extended from the previous, giving more information about what had happened. While these happen at various points throughout the book they never came across as feeling repetitive.
The story does slow down towards the end in terms of pace, I can only assume this was where the ghostwriter was putting in the finishing touches as it feels like it looses some of it’s momemtum at just the wrong time. Whilst there is a nice twist to try and bring it back for a big crecendo it just seems to fall short of the mark.
All in all, I’d still recommend it as I generally found it hard to put down with the amount of mystery, action and the intricate intertwining characters that you would come to expect of a Ludlum book it’s still very much worth reading.
