The Treadstone Resurrection

November 25, 2019
This uneven series launch from Hood (Clear by Fire) introduces Adam Hayes, a graduate of the secret agency Treadstone, first seen in Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne series. Like Bourne, Hayes wants to forget his violent past and sink into obscurity, but that’s not going to happen once Hayes gets dragged into a mission by Nick Ford, an old agent friend from his Treadstone days who is trapped in a fire fight in rural Venezuela. Shortly before Ford is shot dead, he sends Hayes an email with a picture showing CIA agent Jefferson Gray in an aircraft hangar with Col. Carlos Vega, the head of Venezuela’s secret police. Vega is involved, as is Grey, with the president of Venezuela, Eduardo Díaz, in a drug smuggling scheme. The semibionic Hayes is fascinating to follow through the many long, intricate action scenes, but the sheer number of bad guys, who are continually double-crossing each other and have overly complicated motivations, makes it hard for the reader to keep track of the plot. Perhaps next time Hayes’s foes will be more distinct and more worthy opponents. Agents: Sloan Harris and Zoe Sandler, ICM.

December 1, 2019
A disappointing testament to the power of branding. Since Ludlum's death in 2001, his name has appeared possessively on a number of novels, his spirit presumably having inspired authors to work in his distinctive idiom. There's nothing new in this--Robert Parker's characters carry on, as do Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, and it can be gratifying to meet an old literary friend artfully reborn. This example of the Ludlum franchise introduces a new warrior, Adam Hayes, who is a graduate of a new source of agents, Treadstone, a secret CIA program that turns out agents with incredible capabilities and undetectable scruples. Hayes, whose post-traumatic behaviors have imperiled his family, has tried to quit Treadstone, but circumstances compel him to revert to full battle readiness to survive. A conspiracy of rogue CIA agents, corrupt Venezuelan military officials, and a U.S. senator has targeted Hayes because he has received evidence of their malfeasance, but Treadstone itself is in the process of being shut down, and Hayes has limited access to the material support it once provided. Success against the arrayed resources of the CIA seems unlikely, but Hayes is up to the challenge. As the plot moves from violent confrontation to violent confrontation through a catalog of modern weaponry, from conventional sidearms to a seriously presented Hellfire missile strike (on U.S. soil, against U.S. citizens!), the technical designations and capabilities of the weapons are precisely presented and sometimes seem more important than the characters wielding them. And in fact Hayes himself is a weapon: He sheds his humanity so readily that it is difficult to fully accept it. Ludlum was never so one-dimensional. Aggregated violence without much else.

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April 1, 2019

In this first in a new series about Operation Treadstone, the way-under-the radar CIA black ops program that nearly did in Adam Hayes, Adam has tried to keep his distance by working as a cabinetmaker in Oregon. A colleague's spooky letter and an assassination attempt pull him back into the game.

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