Customer Reviews

Tom Clancys Op Centre Call to Treason

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is the eleventh book in the Op-Center series, and is the weakest story yet. Instead of an international crisis or espionage mission, Op-Center finds itself the target of a budget axe, and must downsize. At the same time, Op-Center finds itself drawn into a murder investigation that entangles it in the vicious world of Washington politics.

This book is trying hard to question the motivations and agendas of the powers-that-be in Washington, but fails to hit its target. In the end this book feels more like a worn-out detective story that happens to involve Op-Center characters. Hopefully, future volumes in this series will return to the international stage, where the stories are more interesting, and the potential consequences create more tension.

The helicopters on the cover of this novel are actually flying through all the massive holes in this story's plot.

The final resolution requires the reader to make too many ridiculous leaps. Obviously it's fiction, but the author never draws me in to the world he's attempting to craft. The characters are dry and without depth and most of the dialogue reads like it was written by a 4th grader.

I begrudingly give it two stars because I did stick with it till the end because I HAD to know how it was all going to end ... so I guess that says something.

I really do get disappointed by the commercialism of the 'Tom Clancy' authors these days. While it is undoubtedly a legitimate technique to utilize the worlds and characters created by other authors, this particular work will never be anything like a Clancy at its best.
As these series develop they seem less and less like Clancy.
The characters are becoming unbelievable and the plots lack both plausibility and grit. The "Clancy" of old exploded nuclear weapons in the USA, overturned corrupt presidential régimes and had key characters die when least expected. He took risks based on somewhat believable, though remote, probabilities and displayed to us all some wonderfully flawed characters.
The flawed General Rodgers and Paul Hood of Op-Centre despite their almost diametrically opposed judgments both succeed at the end, but reality isn't like that. It is inevitable that this plot will resolve in the best way for the ongoing society that is the US of A, though the reality of September 11 clearly indicates that truth is never as glowing as Op-Center's successes.
All that said if this wasn't plastered with Tom Clancy's name all over it, the book could probably stand as a reasonable airplane read.
There is a rapidly developing plot but the reader is given too many facts when the surprises could have been so much better had they been revealed later in the plot.
The first murder is engrossing, carefully thought out and well paced but then it all goes downhill. Rovin can obviously write, arouse emotion and deliver action but he is just not able to put this incredibly complex plot together. I doubt anyone could. Maybe it was released for the USA election fever.
Op-center needs to go back to its roots - action, technology, planning and teamwork. I can only hope that number 12 finds its way there. Smart plots building on the characters already developed, with a few surprises, will lead this team back from the wilderness. I hope so as airplane seats are getting smaller and a good yarn is essential to pass the time.

I am a fan of this series (more so than Net Force or Power Plays) and enjoyed this installment (which is a big improvement over the previous one that I couldn't even get through). This one kept me reading all day on Sunday to finish. There may be technical or other errors that other people may note, but I read for enjoyment and nothing jumped out at me right away. One thing I do want to note, after reading reviews of the prevous book in this series it seems that people don't realize Tom Clancy does not write these books. They need to read the cover before criticizing Tom Clancy, the concept was created by Tom Clancy and Steve P. and is now written by Jeff Rovin (I think is his name).

The author Roven is no Clancy. If you are looking for something interesting and full of twists, don't go here. It is a slow drawn out plot of no interest, with no reality. There are several characters that could be the bad guys, but you don't really care if it is them or all of them. After just living through the real overthrow of a government, this is meek, tame and a sleeper. Had a hard time finishing. Better to go with a Clancy military novel.

last year's Sea of Fire was much better (despite its ending)
call to treason is not a very compelling novel
its dry and lacking what most clancy's have such as:
-Twists
-Action
-Thrill

if your a diehard fan there will be no stoping you though i cant recomend it
but for the rest of you pick up something else unless your really desperate

Disjointed, improbable plot... I agree with a previous reviewer, an annoying penchant for totally stupid acronyms. Annoying "faux Clancy" factoids (e.g., totally useless details about the Apache helicopter that had nothing to do with the plot and were just distracting).

I loved Clancy's early work, but his later work (and these subcontracted ghost-written pieces of junk) are pathetic.

I bought this book in an airport to kill time on a long international flight based on the Clancy name. I gave up trying to read it after a few hours because it was so poorly written and edited. The story is so disjointed and the style so annoying I could never get interested in the either the characters or story and never finished it despite repeated attempts. Despite two eight hours flights and being stuck in a foreign hotel without television or radio for a month I could never put up with it for more than a few minutes at a time.

I just finished reading the book 5 minutes ago. I have to say that I found this to be a horrible addition to the Op-Center series. I rarely find a Clancy book book takes more than an evening to read, but this particular volume put me to sleep 3 times.

The writing is cheap and Rovin appears to feel that writing an Op-Center book is only about pointing out neat little factoids regarding achronyms. I often enjoy the achronym game, but I felt it was the only rewarding facit of this book.

Rovin also doesn't understand how to allocate space to different types of content. He seems to go week on the overall plot but instead is more than happy to write prolonged substories about peoples lives paying far too much attention to minute details which have no later benefit. I was quite excited when later in the book, a reference to a location (the capture of Link) seemed to make me believe that an unfortunate occurrance with snakes was impending, but in fact, a several page story regarding snakes in the location early in the book didn't play out. In fact, the book seemed to lack forshadow at any given time.

The author was also painfully repetative with wording and jokes. Most phrases with a buzzword quality became overused and boring quickly. He still insisted on using them over and over anyway.

I truly hope that Clancy and Pieczenik take the time to storyboard and timeline a successor to this book which can repair much of the failures. I believe that instead of having let Rovin ruin the Op-Center series, Steve and Tom should have just ended the series. At this point though, I feel it would be truly unfair to the readers to leave it at this. There is a doomed impending feeling with a massive quantities of open issues which need be addressed. I would simply feel robbed if this is how it all ends.

As for my rating of two stars, this is set this high since I save the one star rating for things like "Matrix Revolutions". I also expect that if Jeff Rovin writes another book, I would like to reserve the one star rating for that. I can only assume that since his writing got worse over the period of 401 pages, another 400+ pages from him would only produce kitty litter.

I bought this book to read at the airport; Clancy's name in big letters on the cover led me to expect another jingoistic international military thriller. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this is a more traditional political drama set entirely within the United States, and that it actually shows some sympathy for non-right-wing viewpoints (the novel's villain is an isolationist, militaristic Presidential candidate). I wonder if the notoriously conservative Clancy is paying much attention to the content of these franchise novels.

A note to author Jeff Rovin: get a grammar textbook and learn about semicolons. I continue to be amazed at the number of successful, published authors who don't know that it's incorrect to join two independent clauses with a comma.