Locked On

 

Locked On – by Tom Clancy with Mark Greaney

A few short years ago, Amazon Prime began showing an exclusive show titled “Jack Ryan”. This show features the lead character of the Tom Clancy books, and deviates from the story that progresses from novel to novel, yet keeps the character, setting, and context the same. In the Amazon series, Ryan is a young-ish CIA employee who seems to have a sixth sense when it comes to Islamic terrorism and the Middle East.  He’s always able to uncover that “one piece of information” that his older, smarter superiors overlook.  This causes him to be able to thwart the terrorists (literally - he’s pretty handy out in the field as well as behind a desk) and always save the Red, White, and Blue from almost certain annihilation.

The reason I mention this is because these novels are basically like “television shows” as well. There really is very little variety from book to book.  There’s always some wide-eyed Islamic jihadist mastermind who makes Osama Bin Laden look like Mary Poppins, a liberal U.S. Government who refuses to acknowledge that Middle Eastern terrorism is a real threat, and a band of renegades (the good guys) who work in the shadows outside of the legitimate government agencies to ensure they keep the country safe.  Although the books are very similar, it’s still best to read these novels sequentially for maximum effect.

These books were very popular in the 1990s, and back then we read about Jack Ryan eventually (and accidentally) becoming President of the United States.  The books fizzled out in the early aughts, yet made a comeback about ten years later starting with the novel “Dead or Alive”.  This book is the second in the “latter” series, and picks up where “Dead or Alive” concludes.  Since time has moved on significantly since the first batch of books, Jack Ryan is now too old to be chasing bad guys through places like Pakistan, so the new hero is…..wait for it…….his son, Jack Ryan Jr.   So Junior really makes up the majority of the focal point in these latter books, but Senior is still around – giving his son advice and trying not to worry about his son’s occupation.  Although Senior is now an Ex-President, he’s so disgusted by the misguided liberal occupying his old job, that he decides to run for the highest office again.  That revelation happened in the aforementioned previous book, and that particular storyline picks up here.

You really need an acquired taste for these books, but judging from their popularity, many obviously have such tastes.  These books are rather thick – somewhere around 850 hardback pages as I recall.  Yet the story moves fast and keeps one interested.  I enjoyed this book a bit better than its predecessor.  Since that one was the first novel after an extended time, Clancy felt obligated to re-educate his readers of all of the characters from the series that most readers had probably forgotten.  This is done (thankfully) to a minimum here, so this leaves much more room for an actual “story”.

Although I must reiterate that the “story” here doesn’t change much from previous offerings. Like a good television show, though, that really doesn’t matter as long as the story is entertaining.  Clancy succeeds where he needs to, and this book will again please the faithful.  You could even argue that the ending is somewhat of a “cliff-hanger” and there’s definitely more of the story to tell.