Below is the complete list of Eric Van Lustbader books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Jason Bourne Books
- The Bourne Legacy (2003)
In the Jason Bourne series, The Bourne Legacy is book #4 and was published in 2003. 
Publication Order of Sunset Warrior Cycle Books
Publication Order of Nicholas Linnear/Ninja Cycle Books
Publication Order of China Maroc Books
Publication Order of Pearl Saga Books
Publication Order of Jack McClure/Alli Carson Books
Publication Order of Bravo Shaw Books
Publication Order of Evan Ryder Books
Publication Order of Standalone Books
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas Books
Publication Order of The MatchUp Collection Books
Publication Order of Batman: Vampire Books
About Eric Van Lustbader
Eric Van Lustbader is an American novelist whose career spans espionage, martial-arts thrillers, speculative fantasy, supernatural adventure, and the continuation of Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne series. His bibliography is unusually broad, moving between contemporary conspiracies and fully invented worlds while retaining a recognizable interest in divided identities, concealed loyalties, inherited power, and characters caught between competing moral traditions.
Born and raised in New York City’s Greenwich Village, Lustbader studied sociology at Columbia College. Before becoming a full-time novelist, he worked in the New York City public-school system and held positions in the music industry with companies including Elektra Records and CBS Records. He also wrote about music for Cash Box, covering artists during a period of major change in rock and popular culture. That background did not lead directly to a career in music journalism, but it helped develop the awareness of cultural shifts and outsider figures that later became important to his fiction.
Lustbader began publishing novels in the 1970s with The Sunset Warrior, the opening of a post-apocalyptic fantasy cycle centered on Ronin. The series combined sword-based adventure, mysticism, political conflict, and speculative world-building, establishing his willingness to blend genres rather than remain within conventional fantasy boundaries. He later returned to large-scale fantasy with the Pearl Saga, beginning with The Ring of Five Dragons, a more expansive work involving rival peoples, religious systems, ancient powers, and imperial struggle.
His major commercial breakthrough came with The Ninja in 1980. The novel introduced Nicholas Linnear, a man of mixed American and Asian heritage whose personal history, martial training, family secrets, and divided cultural identity became central to a long-running sequence. The Nicholas Linnear books helped define Lustbader’s early reputation, combining international suspense with martial arts, corporate intrigue, organized crime, romance, and spiritual conflict. Related works such as the China Maroc novels similarly explore political and personal tensions between East and West.
Later thrillers shifted toward intelligence operations, terrorism, government secrecy, and global conspiracy. The Jack McClure and Alli Carson series begins with First Daughter, while The Testament introduced Bravo Shaw and developed into a sequence involving hidden orders, religious mysteries, and supernatural forces. The Evan Ryder novels, launched with The Nemesis Manifesto, feature a highly capable intelligence operative confronting threats rooted in espionage, advanced technology, and struggles for geopolitical control.
A separate and highly visible portion of Lustbader’s career began when Robert Ludlum’s estate selected him to continue the literary Jason Bourne series. Starting with The Bourne Legacy, he extended the character beyond Ludlum’s original trilogy and wrote numerous subsequent installments. His Bourne novels preserved the central conflict between David Webb and his assassin identity while introducing new conspiracies, intelligence factions, enemies, and recurring characters. These books belong after Ludlum’s original novels rather than among Lustbader’s independently created series, a distinction that makes authorship and publication order especially important when navigating his work.
Some editions have credited him as Eric Lustbader or Eric V. Lustbader, but these are not separate pen names or authors. Van is his middle name and Lustbader his surname, with publishers responsible for much of the variation. His bibliography is therefore best understood by separating his original fantasy cycles, independently created thriller series, standalone novels, and Bourne continuation books.
Across those categories, Lustbader’s fiction is marked by elaborate conspiracies, abrupt reversals, dangerous family histories, international settings, and protagonists whose greatest conflicts are often internal. Whether writing about assassins, warriors, intelligence officers, or heirs to hidden traditions, he repeatedly examines the unstable boundary between duty and autonomy, and the cost of becoming the person others have trained or destined someone to be.