The Sigma Protocol

by Robert Ludlum

2002

Status

Available

Publication

St. Martin's Paperbacks (2002), Edition: 1st, 672 pages

Description

American investment banker Ben Hartman arrives in Zurich for a ski holiday, the first time he's been back to Switzerland since his twin brother died there in a tragic accident four years earlier. But his arrival in Zurich triggers something far more sinister than his brother's fate. When Ben chances upon Jimmy Cavanaugh, an old college friend, Cavanaugh promptly pulls out a gun and tries to kill him. In a matter of minutes, several innocent bystanders are dead - as well as Cavanaugh - and Ben has barely managed to survive. Plunged into an unspeakable nightmare, Hartman suddenly finds himself on the run. Department of Justice field agent Anna Navarro is being stalked around the world by a relentless killer, managing to survive the killer's attacks only by a combination of luck, skill and her own quick wits. These attacks are somehow related to her current assignment: investigating the sudden - and seemingly unrelated - deaths of a number of very old men throughout the world. The only thing that connects them is a file in the CIA archives, over a half-century old, marked with the same puzzling code word: SIGMA. But someone or something is always seemingly one step ahead of her, the survivors are rapidly dwindling, and her own life is in ever increasing danger. Brought together by accident, Ben and Anna soon realize that their only hope of survival lies with each other. Together they race to uncover the diabolical secrets long hidden behind the code word, Sigma. Secrets that threaten everything they think they know about themselves, everything they believed true about their friends and families, and everything they were ever taught about history itself. For behind Sigma lies a vast deception that is finally coming to fruition and the fate and future of the world is in their hands.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member reading_fox
Not very impressive. A worldwide conspiracy of business men from both sides of the war are changing "government" and a few loose ends need tidying up. This spate of deaths brings in an american secret service investigator and a son who interact just about plausably. They are followed by the cartel
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who manage to eliminate most of the clues, but eventually the cartel are tracked to their lair and eistroyed. Not gripping and not believable.
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LibraryThing member cjkarr
Cookie cutter and predictable. Toward the end, I wasn't waiting to find out what was going on. Rather, I was listening to see how long it would take to confirm that which I figured out a couple hundred pages before...
LibraryThing member TheoClarke
Typical Ludlum thriller in which a wealthy American gets sucked into a world of espionage and international conspiracy. Well-paced and wryly characterised, this made a great travel read.
LibraryThing member jaygheiser
Same old formula, pair of incredibly attractive and talented victims manage to avoid the clutches of an international Nazi conspiracy while everyone around them is assassinated. Better writing than Ludlum's earlier works--dialog is much better than Bourne.
LibraryThing member miyurose
This is the first Ludlum book I've read, and I enjoyed it, for the most part. It had a little bit too much bad guy monologging that I tended to skim, but I got the jist of it. I like spy/espionage/intrigue stories, and Ludlum is one of the best.
LibraryThing member Bookmarque
This is my first Ludlum and it was what I expected and not. As I expected it had lots of twists, villains, backstabbing, a weak female lead, unbelievable heroics and narrow escapes. I had not expected zero swearing and little sex. Anna Navarro was useless for almost anything else so why not use her
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requisite ‘beauty’ to jog the story along? Nope. Let her bumbling incompetence be the guide. For an agent that is supposed to be so esteemed and successful, she makes a lot of mistakes. It was annoying. And the lack of swearing made the characters seem somehow less believable. Not a ‘shit’ was uttered even at the most extreme moments.

Of course Ben Hartman, an Ivy League pretty boy has all the innate skill to defeat international assassins. He is always more alert than he should have been and spots trouble before it begins. As if any normal person would behave this way. And of course, in the end they have to get away in a helicopter and having had one lesson where the pilot did most of the work, he can get them off the mountain and safe. Or so they think, there is a stow-away passenger who then tries to kill them. They defeat him of course. By this time, they are sleeping together and are now engaged to be married. How quaint.

The narrator was awesome I have to say. Every character (well almost, some of the Austrians sounded the same) sounded different. He can do French accents, mild Georgia southern accents, Austrian, Swiss, Paraguayan – you name it. He was excellent. Made it much more interesting to listen to than it would have been to read – it also gave some things away that wouldn’t have been so apparent in the printed version. There were some places where they heard just a voice before seeing the person and this narrator gave them their original accents so I could tell who they were. If I had been reading the book, I probably wouldn’t have caught it so soon.
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LibraryThing member CutestLilBookworm
Started off much better than it ended. Lots of action but too much of it predictable. I didn't particularly care for the female protaganist and got tired of the extended history lessons. Despite all that, the overall story was interesting enough that I wanted to finish the book to see how it ended.
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Touching...but kind of weak.
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LibraryThing member Andy_DiMartino
He sure knew how to spin a yarn!!!

Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

2001

Physical description

672 p.; 4.26 inches

ISBN

0312982518 / 9780312982515

Barcode

1600211

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