Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.66 AVERAGE
3.66 AVERAGE
dark
tense
fast-paced
It has been awhile since I have read any of the Jack Ryan series and this was a nice return. The story has moved on to concentrate more on Jack Jr and his friends but the ideas are the same. Overall I really enjoyed it. It does have several nice twists and turns and it is set up for the next one in the series.
adventurous
challenging
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I can definitely tell that this was not a 100% written by Mr. Clancy. This was not one of my favourite books in the Ceres I just think that the potline took too many where twists and they spent just wait too much time making certain parts filler. I wish they would have put part of the whole presidential debate in the Jack Ryan senior books themselves.
This book was a better than Dead or Alive (Jack Ryan Jr., #2).
In Locked On, Clancy (and Mark Greaney) have ironed out most of the issues that I had with the Clancy/Grant Blackwood team that wrote book #2). This book sounds more like "real" Clancy and less like FanFic.
The plot is still a bit convoluted, but in the post-USSR world, it's harder to come up with simple bad guys, so I can understand that.
Jack Ryan (Sr) is running for president against Ed Kealty (the incumbent). The weakest parts of the book are Clancy/Greany's efforts to paint Kealty as a weak-kneed, hopeless liberal. If you know Clancy's politics, this isn't surprising, but it seems like they take it a little too far.
One of the things that Kealty does is try to leverage John Clark against Ryan. This results in a pretty good sub-plot involving Clark... and a realistic one, too, that mostly reflects his real age.
The main plot involves rebels from Dagestan (yes, a real place) and Pakistan, and their plot to cause a lot of mayhem in typical Clancy fashion. Jack Junior is working full-time for The Campus, and he is featured prominently. Even Rainbow Six makes an appearance.
Overall, this book was a good read, and felt like about as vintage as Clancy/cowriter X are going to get these days.
In Locked On, Clancy (and Mark Greaney) have ironed out most of the issues that I had with the Clancy/Grant Blackwood team that wrote book #2). This book sounds more like "real" Clancy and less like FanFic.
The plot is still a bit convoluted, but in the post-USSR world, it's harder to come up with simple bad guys, so I can understand that.
Jack Ryan (Sr) is running for president against Ed Kealty (the incumbent). The weakest parts of the book are Clancy/Greany's efforts to paint Kealty as a weak-kneed, hopeless liberal. If you know Clancy's politics, this isn't surprising, but it seems like they take it a little too far.
One of the things that Kealty does is try to leverage John Clark against Ryan. This results in a pretty good sub-plot involving Clark... and a realistic one, too, that mostly reflects his real age.
The main plot involves rebels from Dagestan (yes, a real place) and Pakistan, and their plot to cause a lot of mayhem in typical Clancy fashion. Jack Junior is working full-time for The Campus, and he is featured prominently. Even Rainbow Six makes an appearance.
Overall, this book was a good read, and felt like about as vintage as Clancy/cowriter X are going to get these days.
There was a period of time, right after college, when I tore through all of the Tom Clancy oevre, and I've been mostly keeping up as he puts out new Jack Ryan novels. Some are better than others. They're kind of guilty pleasures, in that even the bad ones are still exciting and entertaining. I have to say, though, that while the books have always had a conservative bent to them, the more recent stories (including this novel) have gotten awfully heavy-handed on the politics. I do not enjoy that aspect of the story, even if I agree with some of the ideas. But, overall, I enjoyed this book in the same way that I would enjoy a James Bond or a Horatio Hornblower -- it's fun to read about the improbable exploits of a single larger-than-life near-superhero, working in the military and intelligence organizations of world entities about which I know I know next to nothing.
This book is entertaining, but it reads like Clancy wrote the outline and Greaney wrote the book.
As a long-time Clancy fan, I have a real affection for some of the characters that continue to inhabit his stories. John Clark and Ding Chavez play primary roles in Locked On, and it's hard to do anything but root for them. However, Clancy's writing has gone significantly downhill, and this book is just the latest example of that slide.
Clancy lovers have come to expect long, thick novels, and picking this one up off the shelf leads you to believe that it is another of similar size to classics like Red Storm Rising or Clear and Present Danger. However, opening the 900-page book you find that the publisher has reverted to tricks a lazy student uses with a college paper - wide margins, large line spacing, big fonts. There is probably only 60% of the content that used to be in a 900-page Clancy novel.
The book is also sloppily edited. For example, at one point it is noted that Chavez and Clark have been partners "for over 20 years". Further on, though, Chavez says that Clark "is more than twice my age - what, 63, 64?" It doesn't take a math whiz to figure out those numbers are screwed up.
Back in the glory days of this genre, Clancy was cranking out great stuff, WEB Griffin was top-notch, and Larry Bond was putting out some good stuff in the genre when he wasn't co-writing with Clancy. Today, though, I haven't found a younger author to fill that void; everybody seems to be focused on writing 300-page quickies rather than Clancy-length epics. Sad.
Clancy lovers have come to expect long, thick novels, and picking this one up off the shelf leads you to believe that it is another of similar size to classics like Red Storm Rising or Clear and Present Danger. However, opening the 900-page book you find that the publisher has reverted to tricks a lazy student uses with a college paper - wide margins, large line spacing, big fonts. There is probably only 60% of the content that used to be in a 900-page Clancy novel.
The book is also sloppily edited. For example, at one point it is noted that Chavez and Clark have been partners "for over 20 years". Further on, though, Chavez says that Clark "is more than twice my age - what, 63, 64?" It doesn't take a math whiz to figure out those numbers are screwed up.
Back in the glory days of this genre, Clancy was cranking out great stuff, WEB Griffin was top-notch, and Larry Bond was putting out some good stuff in the genre when he wasn't co-writing with Clancy. Today, though, I haven't found a younger author to fill that void; everybody seems to be focused on writing 300-page quickies rather than Clancy-length epics. Sad.
This was part of a reading challenge. This book was my nemesis. It was seriously the book I did not want to read at all. It just did not interest me at all from the description. It was also a pretty big book. Although, it was a faster read than Stephen Kings 11/22/63, which was about equal in length.
I do have to say, I did not really care for this book. It just didn't interest me and I forced myself through it because I just wanted to be finished with it. He has some interesting plot twists and every few chapters has another characters point of view. I figured out the ending pretty quickly. There are a lot of times it was just plain boring and just hard to get through. There's A LOT of military terms and references. I wouldn't really recommend this book. Sometimes they say not to judge a book by it's cover, in this case, do it.
I do have to say, I did not really care for this book. It just didn't interest me and I forced myself through it because I just wanted to be finished with it. He has some interesting plot twists and every few chapters has another characters point of view. I figured out the ending pretty quickly. There are a lot of times it was just plain boring and just hard to get through. There's A LOT of military terms and references. I wouldn't really recommend this book. Sometimes they say not to judge a book by it's cover, in this case, do it.
Clancy wrote this book with a co-author, and I could tell. In fact, I would guess that Clancy mostly wrote the first half of the book, and his co-author the second half...the difference in style, wordsmithing, subtelty, technical knowledge. and so forth seems obvious to me. The deeper I went into the book, the less interesting became - more crude without reason, less well-researched, less technically accurate, less artfully constructed. Too bad, because it had the potential to be a good novel.