Threat Vector

December 24, 2012
This highly readable if workmanlike techno thriller from bestseller Clancy and Greaney (Locked On) chronicles the epic struggle between the United States and a China bent on economic and geographic expansion. When China's President Wei Zhen Lin faces drastic economic problems, he becomes a pawn of Su Ke Qiang, chairman of the Central Military Commission of China, who begins to make aggressive moves in the South China Sea. Meanwhile, someone code-named Center is carrying out extremely sophisticated cyber-attacks against U.S. interests around the world. Various other high-stakes actions occur in Turkey, Russia, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, and Washington, D.C. Fortunately, the Americans can count on U.S. president Jack Ryan, son Jack Jr., and exâNavy Seal John Clark to combat the Chinese giant. Clancy fans will welcome all the high-tech data as well as heroes who can single-handedly take out whole teams of bad guys. Agents: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh and Tracy Fisher, William Morris Endeavor.

January 1, 2013
In which Jack Ryan, Junior and Senior, take on most of the bad guys in the world. Guess who wins. Writing with international relations maven turned novelist Greaney, techno geek and political mayhem lover Clancy (The Hunt for Red October, 1984, etc.) drafts a legion of villains--al-Qaida operatives, rogue spooks, former Gadhafi agents and high-ups in the Chinese Communist Party--who are separately and together up to decidedly no good when it comes to the sovereign interests of the U.S., now led by former CIA agent Jack Ryan. His namesake son is a field agent, as adept as dad at identifying and eliminating threats, and the threats are ever so many. Junior and company have a clinically efficient way about them: "Target Four died, slumped on the floor by the toilet in the bathroom of the sports stadium, certain that this all must have been some terrible mistake." Even so, getting to the heaviest of the heavies, among them brilliant hackers who, from the safety of China, are working 24/7 to break into America's computers, takes them a little more effort and planning. Most of those heavies are believable, though one of them, a certain Tong, has a sort of Odd Job quality to him: "Not much gave him pleasure, his brain had been virtually programmed by the state so that it did not respond to such banal stimuli as pleasure." It's a pleasure, banal or no, to watch the Ryans at work against such fierce competition, and Clancy and Greaney are at the top of their game. Interestingly, too, Clancy's writing has shed some of its erstwhile woodenness, and though he still loves gadgetry and military hardware, his latest doesn't read like a tech manual, which is all to the good. A satisfying thriller, with enough evildoers left over to ensure the possibility of another Ryan-Ryan adventure.

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