Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsFamiliar stuff.
Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 1998
Tom Clancy's recent novels have been much too wordy. Nearly all would have been improved by being a few hundred pages shorter. Someone must have gotten the message to Clancy (or he figured it out himself), because this book is just a little over 700 pages -- brief by recent Clancy standards. And the novel's pacing and general tone do benefit from this brevity. That's the good news.
The bad news is that there's not much here that's new. The central characters are people we know well from previous novels (John Clark and Domingo Chavez), and we don't learn anything new about them here. The sides of their personalities that we see are those we already know well. Familiar and comfortable, yes; revealing or enlightening, no.
The plot elements are mostly recycled, too. The main threat to Life As We Know It is the Ebola virus that was used in Executive Orders. It's been beefed up in a bio-lab to make it easier to spread, but it's not really new. There is also a personal vengeance subplot involving Clark that is similar to the one in Without Remorse, with a similar resolution -- Clark takes the law into his own hands in a mildly creative way. There's more, but nearly all of it fits the pattern: Clancy is reworking materials he's already used.
Another problem with this novel is that the character development of the primary villains is unusually weak, which takes much of the starch out of the good-vs.-evil struggle. These people -- based on the little we learn of them -- are very shallow, even by the normal standards of the Clancy actiontechnothriller genre. Their motivations have minimal credibility, because we just don't know them well enough to find the outlandish things they do very believable.
So, bottom line, this is a pleasant and diverting read but does not engage and satisfy the way the earlier novels do. It's vintage Clancy, but not very original within its genre. All of Clancy's novels make for enjoyable reading, but if you have to skip one, this is the one you'll miss the least.
