Product Description

The brilliant new global thriller from the master storyteller...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #122259 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-20
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Ambler Warning, like many of Robert Ludlum's thrillers, gets much of its sense from our knowledge that intelligence agencies cannot be trusted to play fair even by their own. Hal Ambler is held in a facility for insane agents and is himself being drugged to a point where he cannot trust his own crumbling sanity. Even when he escapes, he is unable to be sure of his own past and identity--his very face is not as he remembers, let alone his fishing cabin and the friends of his youth. Something has been made from the wreckage of his mind, and he is not sure whether every step he takes may not be a part of someone else's plan. By contrast, Caston is the sort of intelligence agent who despises the Hal Amblers of this world--he is an accountant who follows the money of assassination and terror round the world while sitting in front of a monitor. Yet he too starts to get a sense that he is being used.

Part of the originality and strength of Ludlum's new thriller is that he always knows when to pull surprises like the eventual alliance of Caston and Ambler--two dangerously flawed and partial men in search of knowledge and also of wholeness. The glimpses of the great world of political innovation, and the theories that inform them, also give this rather more thoughtfulness than we saw in, say, Ludlum's recent Bourne books. ---Roz Kaveney

IRISH INDEPENDENT, 26 Nov
"The excitement and body count is high"

Synopsis
On Parrish Island, off the coast of Virginia, there is a little known and never visited psychiatric facility. There, far from prying eyes, the government stores former intelligence employees whose psychiatric state makes them a danger to their own government. One of these employees, former 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. Hal pulls off a daring escape and now he's out to discover who stashed him here and why. But the world he returns to has changed. No one remembers him, there are no official records of Hal Ambler, and, when he first looks in the mirror, the face he sees is not his own ...

Customer Reviews

Really - don't bother
I wish I had read the other amazon reviews before I started this book, but I bought it abroad - and it is one of the very few books that I have ever put in the bin. There are so many good thriller writers out there that there is no need to read a pseudo-Ludlum. What is his estate thinking of, comissioning ghost writers? And what is the publisher thinking of, emblazoning Ludlum's name across the cover when he did not write it? These are, of course, rhetorical questions!

Writhing in his grave!!!
I was extremely disappointed with this poor attempt at emulating such a fine writer as Robert Ludlam. I suppose it's a bit like Christmas really. When you're expect something exciting from Santa yet receive a totally different present, you feel let down and very sad. I'm afraid I couldn't even say the suspense and intrigue was anything like the usual Ludlam style. The storyline was OK but certainly not rivetting and the characterisation while good in parts, was only just adequate.
Overall not the sort of legacy one would like to associate with the House of Ludlam. It makes my own humble offering worthy of consideration.

Disappointing
Really disappointing. It took me several weeks to end this book. A record !
I typicall love stories by Robert Ludlum but this one is far from being the best one.
I do not recommend it really.