Chain of Command
By Tom Clancy/Marc Cameron
Release Date: November 16, 2021
Ebook Available from WV Reads!
3 Stars - A fine book, but not a good Jack Ryan book. Cameron handles the thriller portion of it and brings his own sharp style as usual. President Jack Ryan faces one of the hardest days of his life when the First Lady is kidnapped, and it takes the help of old friends to unravel who was behind it. It took a long time for the action to really get rolling but it was entertaining anyway.
Cameron is suitable choice for the long-running series. His law enforcement background makes him adept to take over the action scenes, and he has a similar sense of humor to Clancy that we see briefly. However, this is a real disappointment again to most of us traditional fans. Jack Sr. and Jack Jr. do nothing in this book except step aside. And then it's almost as if Cameron got 3/4 finished and went "yeah, they can't do anything. Just end it." The Campus of course steals the show doing all the legwork and just stumbling into the case as usual. This has credible action sequences, fairly good dialouge, and a lot of honest and straightforward political fair. But it's hard not to be slightly disappointed.
The appearances of Dom, Adara, Clark, Ding, etc. are all perfunctory. Clark daughter/Ding's wife's name is Patsy not Patty, a detail no one cared to catch on edit. Along with a couple typos. Background previous book details are wrong. (Mary Pat did not help Jack take on the IRA.) The action is mainly at Adara's helm. But Cameron is not great with female leads. Adara is running black ops missions unaware or ignoring the fact she's pregnant? I don't think so. She's the medic. Jack Sr. steps aside to let his new and very smart VP do the heavy work. And Jack Jr. is sidelined as well. The father and son duo hug it out in an awkward scene where Cameron calls the President through Jr.'s eyes "The Old Man" three times on a half page instead of "Dad", "his father", or "Senior". Someone should have turned this into a great standalone First Lady kidnapping thriller. None of the characters lived up to their potential good or evil, though they were fairly likable or at least memorable. This book was good, but it could have been great.
(NS)
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