Duty and Honor

From the Paperback Version

Jack Ryan Jr appears once again in this novel that partially owes its success to the fame of Tom Clancy, but which was penned by Grant Blackwood following Clancy’s death in 2013.

It was The Hunt for Red October that propelled Clancy to the best-seller lists, especially after Ronald Reagan’s endorsement of that book as being “my kind of yarn.”

In this more current tale, Jack Ryan Jr, son of President Ryan, finds himself being tracked for assassination.  He doesn’t know who is attempting to find and eliminate him; nor does he know why.

And he doesn’t want his famous dad’s help.

To make the plot more complicated, neither does he know whom he can rely upon to help in his quest to save himself.

Ryan eventually decides to hook up with a journalist-partner who is seeking to burnish his own reputation, yet is a character of initially questionable reliability.

The reader is kept in suspense until Ryan and his journalist-friend discover that an innocuous corporate audit that Ryan performed in his distant past holds the potential to unmask the shady business practices of a European firm involving millions of dollars of corrupt business deals.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed reading another Clancy-like tale of international cunning and intrigue, the prose of Duty and Honor, although good, does not rise to the level of previous stories written by Clancy himself.

It’s very difficult to fill the shoes of a master story-teller.