Ok

The story has a good start, but mediocre middle part and bad ending. Excellent performance.

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entertaing but a bit slow

Good story but slow at times. Could have done with a good editor. typical Tom Clancy. if you like earlier books you'll like this. narrator is very good

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The story continues

Not the best of his books but part of the epic Jack Ryan series. Read well.

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Great story and narration

The story is interesting and well crafted. The narrator can make or break an audio book, and for me Lou Diamond Phillips is excellent!

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Great narrator

Great read. Lou Diamond Phillips does an excellent job narrating.

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3 people found this helpful

enjoyabe

good basic and easy to understand not sd good as executive orders but good . not as in depth enjoy the story and the humour.

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Another Tom Clancy at his best

Yet another outstanding story by Tom Clancy. I am truly enjoying this series about the Adventures of Jack Ryan, Jack Ryan Jr. This book is another follow-up to Campus storyline and the numerous activities of the Campus team and Rainbow 6 the Special Activities Black Ops unit that always manages to, not only save the day, but save the world as well. This, like all his other books is expertly researched and delivered flawlessly. Once started it is extremely hard to put down. Never a dull moment I would highly recommend this audible book to any Tom Clancy fan. An enthralling adventure and awesome listen. Hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

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Great Fan left disappointed

I was very excited with the prospect of Lou Diamond Phillips bringing Jack Ryan to life. The action scenes were brilliant however I got lost in the delivery as to where we were in the story, due to Clancy’s characterful style plot twists that bounce around the planet which I found frustrating.

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Clancy this ain’t, but you could do worse

Performance

I have a bit of a soft spot for Lou Diamond Phillips, though I’ve always found his strongest on screen performances to be when he plays against type.

This performance was consistent throughout all 20+ hours of this book. I would have preferred a bit more life injected into the narration; the Ryan-verse is traditionally very heavily detailed and LDP’s voice was too soothing and the cadence unwavering for the events and stakes being described.

I wonder if a voice-actor would have approached it differently; my gut says his background in film and screen acting was what led to such a distinct focus on dialogue.

He gave some gravel and gravitas to my favourite character (Clark) and distinct personalities to the main players of “The Campus,” but I found one of the female characters to be Monty Pythonesque at times and too many of the incidental characters were difficult to differentiate from their countrymen (generic Russians, generic Americans, etc).

Similarly, I found that it wasn’t always clear to a listener that the story had switched to another location. This happens a lot and my momentary confusion was compounded by sudden gluts of unfamiliar names and places. In fairness, I always find that seeing non-English names, be they places or people, allows me to retain and differentiate between them far more easily.

Perhaps this may not have been a problem if I could have listened without distraction. In my case, that rather defeats the purpose of listening to audiobooks; if I had totally free time then I’d simply read the kindle version.

Story

The story itself is typical of the genre; good vs evil, ever increasing stakes, and extraordinarily unlikely strokes of luck/inhuman feats working in the goodies favour.

Some scenes and philosophical musings should have been, in my opinion, slimmed down or trimmed entirely in the name of brevity and pace. This is, after all, a thriller.

In fact I found some portions of text, particularly the thoughts/motivations of the various bad guys, recurred almost verbatim and with sufficient frequency to mildly irritate me, and disrupted my immersion within the story.

The character development is almost non-existent and this is underscored by the token nods given to it. To give a recurring example: Good-Guy is effortlessly capable > something bad happens > he acts out of character > his colleague asks if he’s ok > he is. Seriously. This happens more than once.

The likes of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher character don’t have these moments of humanity (and are arguably poorer and more psychotic for it) but the slivers of vulnerability shown in this book are so shallow and short as to be little more than a distraction. It might be richer and more realistic, for example, if the good guys persisted despite lingering injuries, doubts and nightmares about kills, close calls, and missed opportunities, and occasionally had to ask for help.

There’s some (token) effort to humanise the bad guys, which is unusual in this genre and is to the author’s credit. If only that could have been applied to the left-leaning US administration who are portrayed as cartoonishly sanctimonious ideologues who are out of their depth, indifferent to economic or military realities, and interested only in self-promotion and the accumulation of power.

Given that many of the actions of the fictional dysfunctional administration almost precisely mirror the events taking place in Trump’s White House, I found the liberal-bashing grated more than it might have a few short years ago when such outlandish incompetence would have been clearly fictional. As I said earlier, this genre is typically about escapism and these scenes were an unwelcome window back into reality.

The series was undeniably better when Clancy was alive and at the helm. The dip in quality and the number of books being churned out does smack of a cash grab by the publisher/rights holder. I doubt it will impact on sales too much for the time being, but that may change as new franchises with better editors are released.

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Enjoyed It

Listened to this in the car back and forward work for the last week or so. Very well narrated.

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