About book Tom Clancy's Full Force And Effect (2014)
Full Force and Effect, reminds me of vintage Clancy. There are hints of the same command of detail and relentless pacing that we were treated to in Clear and Present Danger. Tom Clancy may have left his mortal body in 2013, but the soul of Clancy the epic storyteller lives on in Mark Greaney. But one question for Mark Greaney, "Why all this temporal hop scotch in the beginning?" I can understand a prologue or a chapter or two of historical context to anchor the plot. But all this jumping back and forth in time in the beginning seems unnecessary and demands too much of the reader. Throw in a few Korean characters with hard to differentiate names and pretty soon you have lost the thread. It's like listening to someone tell a story when they keep forgetting something and have to drag you back in time to fill in some crucial detail. Very annoying and counter-productive. Why not just tell the story in chronological order? Fortunately this to-and-fro inexplicably stops a hundred pages or so into the story, and we are treated to some great story telling from there onward. This is, by no means, a bad book. Thanks to Greaney's work with Clancy before his death, the book reads pretty much like a Clancy novel. I give it only three stars only because (along with some other thoughts, below) there's a crispness missing -- and, no, I can't quite put my finger on it -- compared to Clancy's original work. One thing I don't miss from Clancy's style is the many-pages-long technical details he would go into. Certainly, they gave an ultra-realism to the knowledge the characters would need to conduct themselves, but they could come across as ultra boring to those readers who wanted some character development and non-stop action.Without spoiling anything specific, I do have one major complaint: Greaney introduces a character in this novel with lots of potential and then throws them away in a manner which seems to ignore that potential. Perhaps the goal was to show the perils of the spy business, but I think it wasted a great opportunity to bring a new, exciting recurring character to the mix. I think this, along with a few other things I won't spoil, have me asking for this to be the last Ryan novel. Let Clancy and his work RIP.One final thought: having Clancy's name be so huge on the cover could have made people think this was the last Clancy co-written Ryan book. It's not "Tom Clancy's..." title, but makes it look like he's the primary author. The publisher needs to do a better job of not over-marketing Clancy's name when the novel -- barring any other printed explanation -- is not actually his.
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Really enjoyed this and like the way it was written. Glad to see the series continued.
—kebegan
Great read! Current with todays headlines.
—Monkey
