Matarese

About the Matarese series

The Matarese are a shadowy Corsican-founded network of industrialists and power brokers who have spent generations quietly manipulating global politics and economics from behind the scenes, and the two agents forced to unite against them are the heart of Robert Ludlum's Matarese duology. The Matarese Circle (1979) pairs an American and a Soviet intelligence officer — bitter Cold War enemies — who must cooperate when they discover a conspiracy larger than either of their governments, a premise that let Ludlum subvert Cold War thriller conventions almost two decades before the wall fell.

The Matarese Countdown (1997) returns to the conspiracy a generation later, in a post-Cold-War world where the Matarese's ambitions have only grown more dangerous. The two books can be read as a complete arc bookending the fall of the Soviet Union, and are considered among Ludlum's most ambitious conspiracy plotting outside the Bourne trilogy.

How to read this series

Publication order: The Matarese Circle (1979), then The Matarese Countdown (1997). The two books share the same conspiracy across an 18-year real-world gap, so reading them in order gives the full arc, though each is written to stand largely on its own.