coolreads# Retro Books # Black Blade

Black Blade
Author: Eric van Lustbader
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0449221962
Year Published: 1993

In New York City, several brutal murders take place while in Washington, a plot conceived at the highest levels of American government is at work to bring the economic might of Japan to its knees.

Meanwhile, in Tokyo, a critical power struggle is coming to its final stages for the control of the enigmatic Black Blade 

Society, a supposedly political cabal whose motives encompass far more than politics.

In fact, the Black Blade Society is planning to take over the world through economic domination. The society has also discovered a way of overcoming ageing - its leader is a very old woman who still looks young, sexy, and has a familiar kind of Asian luster.

This being Japan and as a woman, she has to stay behind the scene and is fronted by a prominent industrialist, Naohatu Nishitsu, who is also the society's nominal head.

Rivals to the society include a young Japanese genius Yuji Shian of bioscience and his mother, Minako - they've devised an artificial intelligence called Oracle that works on DNA, and has now become a superhuman. It can suck humans into its intelligence, and no longer needs a power source to keep it going.

The mother, though, plays a double or even triple game and appears ready to undermine both her son and the Black Blade Society.

This, in a nutshell, is the dynamic setting for Black Blade, another thriller by bestselling author Eric Lustbader.

As chief of New York Special Homicide Task Force, Wolf Matheson possesses an uncanny ability to track down and capture murderers where all others have failed. This is because Wolf has extrasensory powers, can read auras, and pick images from people's minds. But the villains - and the Japanese heroine - have not only the sight, a mind-reading ability, but also 'makura no hiruma' power and can harm a person physically with their spiritual inner being as they strive to win the powers of the Oracle.

Enlisted to solve the murder of New York's best-known real estate tycoon, Wolf soon finds himself caught in a frightening spiral of betrayal, lust, and greed, where no one can be trusted.

Wolf, son of a Wind River Shoshone and a Texas Ranger, soon discovers that murder is the least of the crimes that have been committed - treason, espionage, even, almost unthinkably, the quest for immortality - are all a prelude to an imminent global war.

In a whole new arena which is larger and more terrifying than any he has been in before, Wolf finds he must battle people possessed of a mind power so powerful and lethal it has remained hidden for centuries. To do this, he will have to unlock the secrets of his own past. Worse, he is forced into an uneasy alliance with the beautiful Japanese woman Chika, who will become either his saviour or his murderer.

In Japan, those who control the Oracle will have the power to change the balance of world power forever. Each faction of the Black Blade Society - and now Wolf and Chika - is caught in a deadly race against time to find the Oracle before it is put into use. Can Wolf's occult muscle match the intelligence of the Oracle?

Black Blade is an exciting journey and a brilliant excursion into adventure and romance, intrigue and sex, and providing a feast of insights into the mysteries of the Oriental mind. An intriguing read.

* Check out Eric van Lustbafer's Bio@Biography.