Jack Ryan has come a long way since Hunt for Red October. He is POTUS now, President of the United States. He is watching the burning ruins of the Capitol (What is Osama bin Laden’s bedtime reading?). He has a job he doesn't want, a lot of people think the same, terrorists want to kill him, his family and as many fellow Americans as they can. Throw in a second Gulf war and you have plenty of reading material for those whopping thirteen hundred odd pages.
You should be into militaristic thrillers - there is plenty of techno babble. Abrams tanks, Humvees, stealth planes, submarines, missiles - it goes on and on. I skipped a lot of that when I read the book the first time around. Now, re-reading it, I did that even more so. But the story is still a very good one.
I never though I would say that about a book, but there is too much character development. One guy has a thought and he thinks and thinks and thinks for pages and pages.... Generally not a bad thing in a book, it just gets a bit too much here. But you get plenty of excellent action in between to make up for it. Never a dull moment (in the bits that I did not skim over....).
I keep wondering what kind of a book this would have been, if it lost about 500 pages or so. The time and pages it takes Tom Clancy to set the scene for the final climax, is enough for other authors to write complete novels....
But despite that, one of my favourites.
