Target Acquired
By Tom Clancy/Don Bentley
Release Date: June 8, 2021
Ebook Available from WV Reads!
1.5 Stars - Bentley shows some promise as the latest Clancy 'coauthor' but he's lacking the magic touch here in a big way. Jack Jr. has another whole new personality as another author ventures farther from the ideas that started his series. There's plenty of action and the sequences are well written. The technical jargon Clancy series embraced feels real but this particular target is missing the mark in big ways.
I'm always willing to try a new author in this series because even Blackwood who hated Clancy's style managed to write a few decent entries. I event try the author's other series as well. Bentley shows a lot of promise in the action thriller genre. I was into his "Without Sanction" right until he started down the crazy, unrealistic path toward the 2/3 mark. Target Acquired is more of the same. Reasonable sequences and characters until they're just not. Jack Ryan Jr should have come a long way since his early campus day. In some ways he has, in some ways, he hasn't. And that's a problem for Clancy fans who enjoyed Jack Sr.'s rise through the CIA and politics while raising a family and maintaining his human side at the same time.
This is an improvement over coauthor Maden, maybe even Cameron. Not up to the standards of Blackwood or Greaney. Maden made Jack Jr. out to be an idiot in several of his novels. But Bentley tries to move him inanother direction that doesn't make much sense. He's apparently on Clark's level now of skill and toughness, despite having about 1/3 level of his years in the field and none of his Seal training. My biggest problem though was the plot set up here. Bentley seemed to think he was being original by having Jack rescue and protect a child who happens to be on the autism spectrum. Well, that's been done before in another action thriller series as anyone who has watched Bruce Willis in Mercury Rising could tell you. I was literally rolling my eyes as Jack swooped in at the exact right time to save the boy. Then flipped out on friendly if skeptical debriefing agents just a couple pages later. Bentley is too green as a writer in my opinion to fill Clancy's shoes at this point. Some ghostwriters are up to the challenge and he could me with some more emphasis on writing a thoughtful, carefully plotted thiller rather than the next action movie script.
(NS)
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