Reads like a right-wing shopping list, something that was already the case with "Rainbow Six" and "The Bear and the Dragon", but those at least had a semblance of a plot, to keep it going. The premise of TOTT is set in a conversation between Jack Ryan, Jr, and his new boss, former Senator Hendley. Amidst jabs at Clinton's sex scandals and opponents of the death penalty, Hendley explains that despite former President Ryan's best efforts, the CIA is still a broken system, due to the senators and congressmen who constantly stab it in the back and deny it funding. The reason CIA can't work, simply put, is that government is too inefficient. The solution - privatize intelligence. Hendley runs a privately funded anti-terrorist agency which Congress and the White House know nothing about, because that's the only way to defend America. I swear I'm not making this up.

The rest of the plot is fairly simple. 1) Terrorists attack Americans. 2) Jack kills the terrorists. Over and out. None of the complexity and intrigue that made, say, Cardinal of the Kremlin. The rest of the book is largely taken up by Clancy's ideological ravings. The evils of Congress. The evils of the EU. The terrorist hatred for our freedoms. The icing on the cake was a three or four page insight into the mind of Osama Bin Laden, which ended with the latter praising Ronald Reagan for destroying the Soviet Union. Um, Tom? Al-Qaeda would never credit anyone other than *themselves* for bringing down the USSR. The whole premise of the war is that if the jihad could bring down one superpower, they can bring down the other.

Character development; again, failure. Jack Jr. is a rehash of his father, right down to his college and major. The other characters, as usual, are cardboard cutouts who again do little more than stand around and agree with one another, saying and thinking the same things over and over.

Relevance to international affairs; well, he finally put together a plot that wasn't commie-smashing Cold War nostalgia. The idea of Ryan in the war on terror would actually have been fairly interesting if he'd developed it better - sadly, as stated above, he didn't.

So overall, no, I wouldn't recommend you buy this or even rent it. Read some of his earlier books, the ones that aren't listed on BookBrowse - anything between Hunt for Red October and Executive Orders was a true masterpiece. The best thing about this book, however, was that it was his last. RIP.

As I indicated in my last review, Clancy went bad in "Rainbow Six." In this book, he gets worse.

The plot; very unlikely. Very contrived. Very predictable for anyone who's read TC before - "Red Storm Rising" was the same basic story told with much greater skill.

The style; again, predictable, and redundant. The same words and messages are used from beginning to end, both by the narrator and his characters; the reading gets tiresome very quickly.

The relevance to international affairs, which made Clancy so famous in the eighties; zilch. Pigs will fly before Russia joins NATO or China invades Russia.

The characters; even more cardboard than usual, and all clones of one another. The same language, attitudes and personalities are grafted onto Ryan, Clark, Chavez, Robby, Nomuri, Adler and all the heroes - though some characters are allowed to become even more extreme so as to make Ryan appear "moderate."

The rhetoric; predictable right-wing diatribe, but this time tainted with a very ugly anti-Asian racism. Chinese culture, history, geography, society, economics and politics are all grossly misrepresented by the author, in sharp contrast to the respect he displayed for Russian or Middle-Eastern culture in earlier books.

Bottom line; don't buy it. Check it out at the local library if you're really curious. I promise you'll be as disappointed as I was.

As popular as "Rainbow Six" was, to me it is this book, and not "The Bear and the Dragon," in which Clancy went bad. There, I said it.

Tom Clancy is an author I have always appreciated for his complex and realistic portrayal of war, the intelligence business and international affairs in general. He uses realistic and human characters on both sides of the fence, explores complex and very relevant moral issues and drops them into a thrilling plot that will entertain the reader while still informing and causing him to think. It's what made his success in "Red October" and "Red Storm" and kept him going through every book until "Executive Orders" (his best work, by the way).

"Rainbow Six" disappoints because it exhibits none of these qualities. Clark and Chavez are cardboard, Captain America characters with none of the darker tones and human qualities that they had in previous novels. The plot is predictable and recycled; the virus plot was already in the last book, the "terrorists threaten loved ones" scene has been done to death, and one interrogation scene was lifted right out of "Patriot Games." Complex themes and moral issues are replaced by a gung-ho, Curtis LeMay militarism of the very sort that Clancy sought to exorcise when he first started writing.

Even worst from my point of view, Clancy's books are no longer even remotely relevant in the world of IR. While the last two books had Ryan dealing with new threats in a new world order, this book brings back the threat of Marxist terrorism (why not islamists, or something more relevant?) and ties it into U.S. politics with a ridiculous cheap shot at an environmental movement with a hidden Nazi/SPECTRE agenda (and yes, both comparisons are explicitly used). Clancy takes us back to the Cold War in a giant time loop that persists through the next two books, with his last one being a failed attempt to reconnect with the real world.

So, the demise of one of my favorite authors. He goes from being a first-rate author to a cheap ideological hack in only one book, a free-fall that continues and worsens in the next three books. RIP Tom Clancy.