Last Snow takes place primarily in Russia and Ukraine. Jack is now working for the president, who has taken his family to Moscow to sign a missile accord with the Russian president. An American senator, who is traveling in Ukraine, turns up dead on the island of Capri. The President asks Jack to look into out. He teams up with Alli, the president's daughter. Lustbader says, "Jack and Alli are thrown into a life-threatening situation that includes one of my all-time favorite characters, a female Russian FSB agent named Annika. Annika is one of those complex characters who, like Leonid Arkadin, needs more than one book to tell her whole story, so she'll be back in the third novel in the series, which I'm writing now."

Lustbader points out that some of the puzzles in Last Snow are such that they could only be solved by someone like Jack, with his dyslexic brain. "One of the great things about this series is taking a main character whose brain works differently than most people's, showing the difficulties it causes him--everyday things we take for granted, like reading--how he compensates, overcomes, and, ultimately uses what we can now see as a gift to solve problems others can't."

The idea for Last Snow came from a New York Times article about Russian history and how, after the breakup of the USSR, many of Russia's leaders secretly plotted ways to regain their country's old power. Lustbader says, "One of the ways was to start expanding again, as in Georgia not too long ago. I started speculating on what would make Russia go for a quick land-grab, and came up with uranium."

Lustbader says he does "anything and everything" to research his novels. "I travel a lot. I pore over news reports constantly. I try to intuit which way the wind is blowing, so to speak. There's a lot of arcane research I'm required to do. If I had to seek out experts, I'd be at it for years. Instead, I use Google. With it, I can find out not only which restaurants in Moscow or Kiev are the best, but I can also see their interiors, read their menus, and talk to the chefs. And now Google maps lets you see a 'street view' of cities, putting you literally on the streets so you can see the shops, architecture, etc. God bless Google!"

And for readers curious about the further adventures of Jason Bourne, The Bourne Objective is due out in June 2010, the fifth Bourne novel Lustbader has written. Lustbader says, "It's the third in the trilogy that co-stars Leonid Arkadin, the Russian assassin who turns out to be the first Treadstone graduate. The cat-and-mouse game Bourne and Arkadin play out over this extended canvas has been one of the great joys to write. Arkadin is Moriarty to Bourne's Holmes, so perhaps we haven't seen the last of him. Fans are always asking if I'll continue writing the series. The answer is I will, as long as it remains fun for me to do."

Undoubtedly Lustbader's many fans hope he continues having fun for years to come.