Brilliant, as Clancy usually is. With amazing insight into the good vs. evil battle that humanity is engaged in--terrorism and the Middle East, leftovers from communism and the Cold War, and the mettle that is American patriotism work together in a rather bone-chilling plot. The too-close-to-reality-for-comfort is there and it's almost frightening to read because really, it could happen.

Typical Clancy - a thrill ride.

When I see a famous writer co-author their book with a relative unknown, I usually get a negative feeling. Someone like Tom Clancy would do this for one of few reasons: He may have run out of steam and needs a fresh player, or he may be putting his name on a relatively novice writer's book.

I had more or less written Clancy off when I read his Teeth of the Tiger. Telling the story of an attempt to catch a world-known Islamic fundamentalist terrorist, it used Clancy's popular themes and narratives, but did not really go anywhere, unlike his many best-sellers.

Dead or Alive continues the story. To my surprise, it is a well-written book. Okay, it does not have the wild plot elements Clancy used in his previous best-sellers (notably Executive Orders, which eerily shadows the still-to-come September 11th) but the action is fine. It will probably map veteran readers happier as compared to newcomers, since it has a lot of the old friends. Jack Ryan senior is back, and it is obvious he will have a big role in the next book.

Not a good Clancy book. Reads like a bad Made for TV movie.

Average Clancy with predictable characters and storyline. Certainly no where near as good as Clancy's earlier books.

Enjoyed the reintroduction of my favourite characters but this text was trying too hard to add humour, detracting from what makes Jack Ryan novels so good.

This is the 13th book in the Jack Ryan series and also the 2nd book in the Jack Ryan Jr. series. I'm a bit unsure how to rate this one for this reason: I really liked getting back into the universe of John Clark and Ding Chavez and even Jack Ryan but I found the plot to meander all over the place. It's as if the author(s) weren't sure where they were going or which series they were writing in. And, it could have used a better editor. Too many plot lines that didn't really go anywhere and just seemed thrown in to pad the length. It is a Clancy novel so there are still a few too descriptive military hardware instances, like "CV312 Pave-Low Ultra X-90 Penetrating Roadrunner Helo with GBA-47 double-impact heat-encrusted turbo lift thrusters augmented by THX Surround Sound". OK, I made that up but you get the idea.

This is the first Clancy novel I've seen with a co-author. Of course Clancy is one of the biggest "franchise" authors out there but I'd hoped he would retain the Ryan series as his own. So I'm not sure how much of this is by Clancy and how much by Grant Blackwood, but it seems to read fairly consistently with the last several Clancy offerings. That's not necessarily good because I prefer the older stuff.

I did listen to this as an audio book and I must compliment the reader, Lou Diamond Phillips. I knew from his acting that he has played a wide variety of ethnic cultures but his accents here are amazingly varied. He had to do Russian, Australian, Scottish, Israeli, Iranian, Afghan, Mexican, and numerous middle-eastern and of course, American accents. Well done. Too bad the material wasn't up to par.

His books were much more fun when they were more about adventures and spies, the pragmatists vs the politicians. Since Rainbow Six it has been more about this vs. that type of politicians, what he posits as crazy idealists (eco-terrorists, environmentalists) vs. sane idealists (people do what need to be done to protect the country). I know people don't usually read thrillers for political nuance and he is entitled to his opinions but the heavy-handedness really bothered me. I think he presents an important perspective of the war on terror, but I feel like he undermines himself when he trashes others' viewpoints and casts them as insane/stupid. And the editing was poor, just simple things like missing quotation marks and random colons. At one point one person was tailing the suspect but then his name was confused with the name of the other team of agents who were not in the scene.