Mark Greaney is at the helm of this action-adventure thriller, this time with a devious yet believable story about radical terrorist attacks in America.
It all begins when Romanian hacker Alexandru Dalcu worms his way into a lost US Office of Personnel Management file containing American security clearance applications. Dalcu’s skulduggery employs open-source intel fusing legal data with an illegal theft of data and then weaponising the results.
Wanting another price-boosting oil crisis, a rogue Saudi pays Dalcu to build dossiers on key American anti-terror fighters. The Saud then sells the info to Islamic State group headed by Abu Musa al-Matari. Musa then recruits radical sympathisers unknown to security services to strike the targets within America.
The thriller is further complicated because Dalcu and ARTD, his shady employer, had been hired for spy work by the People’s Republic of China, and they’re out for blood too.
Once again, the chief protagonist is Jack Ryan Jr., son of longtime Clancy hero and now US President Jack Ryan. Junior works as an operative for Hendley Associates, a private CIA-type company hiring out for blacker-than-black ops. Longtime Clancy characters such as Clark, Ding, and the president’s nephew, Dominic Caruso, are also Hendley agents. Newbie "Midas" Jankowski, former Delta Force op, adds one more iron-jawed one-dimensional terminator. Action around a female Army helicopter pilot/gunner in Iraq provides an additional minor threat as Hendley operatives Gulfstream from Bucharest to the Blue Ridge Mountains and the tense, fast-paced action reels out with headlines of homeland terror attacks.
President Jack Ryan will need to put his personal feelings aside to save the nation from a ruthless adversary.
As terrorists conspire to draw the United States into war, the president faces his toughest challenge yet as the commander-in-chief. America is now under attack in more ways than one. It comes to the attention of the CIA that someone is selling classified information on the dark web and the information up for grabs included lengthy and detailed profiles of America’s highest-ranking military personnel and undercover operators.
That information, which was discreetly purchased and verified, is then shared with an ISIS official in control of numerous sleeper cells in America. Fully aware of the West’s reluctance to put boots on the ground to fight the terror group in Iraq and Syria, a plan is hatched to draw them into a war on their terms.
Rather than kill average, everyday American citizens, their plan was to concentrate ISIS resources towards taking out targets worthy of getting the attention of the US in a more high-profile way, hoping to force a response. And that's where Jack Ryan Jr and his colleagues come to the rescue.
Although Tom Clancy died in 2013, his novels were blockbusters that focused primarily on technology while the people involved were secondary. Action-thriller author Greaney, who has continued the series, handles the tech side with grace and has fleshed out the cast and given them depth.
Amazingly, Greaney has captured everything that fans loved about Tom Clancy while interjecting shots of suspense and energy that will have readers turning pages at a faster rate. For a book that comes in at just under eight hundred pages long, the pacing is surprisingly fast.
The plot is smart and crisp, and, as always, Jack Ryan proves yet again why he’s one of the most iconic characters ever created.
A must-read for anyone who considers themselves a fan of thrillers.