A man washes up on a beach with a bullet wound, no memory and the Roman numeral XIII tattooed on his collarbone. He may be the man who assassinated the President of the United States, and everyone, from secret agents to a mysterious conspiracy, wants him either dead or on their side.
Van Hamme took his starting point from Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity, and XIII became one of the biggest European thrillers of the 1980s and 1990s, with a video game, a television series and many sequels. Vance's art is precise and cinematic, and Van Hamme's plotting is ingenious, if occasionally baffling.
