Summary
Long before he became President, Jack Ryan was a novice CIA analyst. One of his first assignments was to help debrief a high-level Soviet defector who told an amazing tale: top Soviet officials are planning to assassinate the Pope, John Paul II. As the days and weeks go by, Ryan must battle, first to try and confirm the plot and then to prevent the assassination. In the end, it will not just be the Pope's life but the stablility of the Western world that is at stake
Published Reviews
Booklist Review:
"Set in 1981, this surefire best-seller features Jack Ryan as a novice CIA analyst."
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Publisher's Weekly Review:
"There's not a shot fired until page 602 in Clancy's lumbering new thriller, and readers up on their history will know the outcome of that shot on page 17. What comes in between is a slow-moving but, given Clancy's astonishing flair for fly-on-the-wall writing, steadily absorbing imagining of the back story behind Mehmet Ali Agca's (real-life) failed attempt on the life of Pope John II in 1981. By going back 21 years, Clancy provides a fresh adventure for a young Jack Ryan, but Ryan fans (and presumably Ben Affleck) may be surprised to learn that Ryan is, until the final scenes, only a supporting player here. The book's main heroes are the husband-and-wife team of Ed Foley, CIA station chief in Moscow, and his agent-wife, Mary Pat, and Oleg Zaitzev (code-named Rabbit), the mid-level employee in the KGB communications department who for conscience's sake decides to defect to America when he's asked to encrypt messages that reveal a plot, under the auspices of then-KGB chief Yuri Andropov, to kill the pope in response to the pontiff's secret letter threatening to resign the papacy and to return to Poland to resist Soviet domination. In real life, the pope wrote such a letter, and analysts have long speculated that the Soviets, via Bulgarian controllers, dispatched Agca to kill him. It's utterly fascinating to read Clancy's playing out of that likely scenario is there a writer in the world who brings so much verisimilitude to scenes both high (Politburo meetings) and low (details of spy craft and everyday Soviet life)? But while Clancy delivers a believable and encyclopedic version of real-life events, the suspense is minimal (Rabbit's defection goes off without a hitch) a disappointment when other writers (Forsyth in Day of the Jackal, for one) have shown that there can be enough tension in a fated-to-fail assassination plot to give a stroke to a yoga master. (Aug. 5) Forecast: That this will hit #1 is obvious; the guessing game is, for how many weeks? We predict through Labor Day, at least. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved"
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Additional Information
| Series |
Jack Ryan thriller (publication date order)
Features Jack Ryan, Sr., a CIA Deputy Director of Central Intelligence who eventually serves two terms as President of the United States
#1 - The Hunt for Red October
#2 - Patriot games
#3 - The Cardinal of the Kremlin
#4 - Clear and present danger
#5 - The Sum of all fears
#6 - Debt of honor
#7 - Executive orders
#8 - Red rabbit
#9 - Command authority
#10 - Full force and effect
#11 - Commander in chief
#12 - True faith and allegiance
#13 - Power and empire
#14 - Oath of office
#15 - Code of honor
#16 - Shadow of the dragon
#17 - Chain of command
#18 - Red winter
|
| Subjects |
John Paul
-- II,
-- Pope,
-- 1920-2005
-- Assassination attempts
-- Fiction.
Ryan, Jack,
-- Sr. (Fictitious character)
-- Fiction.
Intelligence officers
-- Fiction.
Americans
-- England
-- Fiction.
Assassination
-- Fiction.
Popes
-- Fiction.
|
| Publisher |
Waterville, Me. : Bath, England,Thorndike Press,2002
|
| Language |
English
|
| Description |
887 pages (large print) ; 24 cm
|
| ISBN |
0786240644 (U.S.)
0754018415 (U.K.)
|
| Other |
Classic View |