Floating City (Nicholas Linnear Series #5)

Eric Van Lustbader, who delivers electrifying suspense in the #1 bestsellers featuring Robert Ludlum’s™ Jason Bourne, sends an honor-bound Ninja on a death-defying mission deep in the Vietnamese jungle.

A ruthless American killing machine named Rock rules over a secret, blood-soaked empire of riches and murder: Floating City. At his command is the Torch—the tool of ultimate evil that one man can destroy: Nicholas Linnear. But only when he faces the harrowing truth about the Yakuza—the Japanese criminal underworld he despises—and about Koei, the woman he loved as no other, will he find the inner strength to annihilate Floating City and honor his family’s debt to the dead of the Yakuza, the Kaisho. While half a world away, his longtime friend ex-NYPD detective Lew Croaker hunts the Kaisho’s would-be assassins, Linnear infiltrates a vast web of terror, crossing the line that divides good from evil, sensuality from death, and love from betrayal.

Eric Van Lustbader, who delivers electrifying suspense in the #1 bestsellers featuring Robert Ludlum’s™ Jason Bourne, sends an honor-bound Ninja on a death-defying mission deep in the Vietnamese jungle.

A ruthless American killing machine named Rock rules over a secret, blood-soaked empire of riches and murder: Floating City. At his command is the Torch—the tool of ultimate evil that one man can destroy: Nicholas Linnear. But only when he faces the harrowing truth about the Yakuza—the Japanese criminal underworld he despises—and about Koei, the woman he loved as no other, will he find the inner strength to annihilate Floating City and honor his family’s debt to the dead of the Yakuza, the Kaisho. While half a world away, his longtime friend ex-NYPD detective Lew Croaker hunts the Kaisho’s would-be assassins, Linnear infiltrates a vast web of terror, crossing the line that divides good from evil, sensuality from death, and love from betrayal.

Publishers Weekly

Lustbader fans will herald the coming of this latest adventure in the astonishingly turbulent life of half-Asian, half-Caucasian, all-hero fighting machine Nicholas Linnear. Newcomers to the author's idiosyncratic work, however, may have trouble getting with this sequel to The Kaisho , which not only features the usual heaping doses of violence, sex and Japanese mysticism but requires pages of difficult exposition to recap the story thus far, which hooks on high-tech shenanigans. The novel opens with a trademark example of Lustbader's eroticized violence, as a Vietnam vet in 1983 Burma struggles to maintain his foothold among the nation's drug lords and exacts a deliciously nasty vengeance against a bitter enemy. Leap to the present and Linnear, soon trapped in Saigon's famed underground tunnels with only his `` tanjian eye ''--some sort of sensory enhancement that is mentioned all too often--to guide and protect him. Meanwhile, back in the U.S., Linnear's old friend, ex-NYPD detective Lew Croaker, is also on the case, unleashing his prosthetic hand, complete with retractable claws and powered by lithium batteries, whenever the occasion arises. And so the wildly improbable but amazingly energetic action goes, from Washington to Tokyo and back to Vietnam, with periodic flashbacks thrown in, as well as a mobster nicknamed ``Bad Clams'' and a drug-lord named ``Rock,'' until it reaches not a conclusion but a setup for the next Linnear thriller (`` So it's not over , Vesper thought. It's just beginning ''). This is the kind of novel that fans of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles read when they grow up--and no one does it with more punch than Lustbader. (Aug.)

Eric Lustbader is the author of more than twenty-five best-selling novels, including The Ninja, in which he introduced Nicholas Linnear, one of modern fiction's most beloved and enduring heroes.

In 2004, Mr. Lustbader was chosen by the estate of the late Robert Ludlum to continue the Jason Bourne novels. The first, The Bourne Legacy, was published in 2005. It garnered rave reviews and was an instant international bestseller. He is currently at work on the second Bourne novel, to be published in 2007. He is also the author of two successful and highly regarded series of fantasy novels, The Sunset Warrior Cycle and The Pearl Saga.

He and his wife Victoria have been residents of the South Fork of Long Island for more than fifteen years.