What Was the Last "Real" Robert Ludlum Novel?

Robert Ludlum is one of those authors who has famously been more "prolific" in death than in life. Publishing 22 novels during his lifetime in the 30 year period between 1971 and 2001 (excluding the first of the formally "co-authored" Covert One series), five more "Robert Ludlum" novels were "posthumously published" in the next five years, while we have had up to three more "Ludlum novels" every year since. (Thus are there now some nineteen Jason Bourne novels written to exploit the success of the Matt Damon-starring films, with two more scheduled for release in 2025, along with a trickle of the associated Treadstone novels, and more of those Covert One books, and Paul Janson books, and apparently an attempt at yet another series with The Blackbriar Genesis.)

Of course, alert readers with even a minimum of experience of these things know that such works tend to be very obviously not "the real thing," and often not even different-but-good--just "phoned in," formula, stuff cashing in on the Big Name slapped on the cover. Indeed, I remember that reading that first Covert One book, The Hades Factor, I felt the difference from the very first paragraph. Consider how it set the scene in London for the opening of the story proper in Chapter One, telling us of a cold October rain upon the crush of traffic at the intersection of London's Brompton Road and Sloan Street on the weekend, while slipping in the sentence "The world economy was good, the shops were full, and New Labor was rocking no one's boat" before getting on to how tourists now came to the city all year round.

This laughable neoliberal benediction upon post-Thatcher London was very obviously not the writing of Ludlum, who to his credit never offered an opening this unintentionally silly--but it was very, very much of that era in which supposedly learned people took Thomas Friedman seriously. Still, it seems to me that such material was appearing under the Ludlum name long before such tripe as the first Covert One novel, with indeed The Scorpio Illusion already giving such an impression. A simple tale of an intelligence officer brought out of retirement to chase a terrorist intent on assassination, in spite of its element of mischief in high places, that book's story lacked the texture of his plots--and of Ludlum's much-criticized but nevertheless distinctive prose. The contrast was even more pointed in the follow-up The Apocalypse Watch, and on it went through the decade (with The Matarese Countdown, with The Prometheus Deception). Indeed, even if they were officially by Ludlum I wondered if the books were not actually written in significant part by others, or failing that heavily worked over for a more "contemporary" reader before they hit the market, as recently looking at The Road to Omaha it seems to me that that book, not just in spite of but because of its faults, was the last "real" Ludlum novel--while given its making a comedy rather than a thriller out of its story of political intrigue, the book before it, The Bourne Ultimatum, the last "real" Ludlum thriller.