Eric Van Lustbader

Eric Van Lustbader had already built a long career in thrillers and martial-arts-inflected adventure fiction — starting with 1980's The Ninja, which introduced his signature creation Nicholas Linnear across six bestselling novels — by the time Robert Ludlum's 2001 death opened the question of who would continue Jason Bourne. Van Lustbader took over in 2004 with The Bourne Legacy and wrote eleven Bourne novels through 2017's The Bourne Initiative, expanding Ludlum's paranoid Cold War premise into broader international conspiracy and giving the amnesiac assassin back most of his memory before handing the series to another author in 2020. A Columbia-educated New Yorker who published his debut novel in 1975, Van Lustbader has written more than three dozen books across his own series and continuation work, and has kept publishing steadily since leaving Bourne — most recently the Evan Ryder thriller series, which reached its fifth entry in late 2025. Readers who know him only from Bourne should be aware the novels diverge sharply from the Matt Damon films after the first book; readers new to his work entirely might start with The Bourne Legacy as the most accessible on-ramp, or seek out The Ninja for his original, non-Bourne voice. Now in his eighth decade, he remains an active, working thriller novelist with a catalog that stretches back fifty years.