Books - Red Rabbit

Red Rabbit

by Tom Clancy

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Once upon a time my aunt worked for Penguin/New American Library and got me all the Clancy books as they were published. She has since retired and I basically stopped reading them. So it was a nice homecomming of sorts to take “Red Rabbit” out of the library and enter the world of Jack Ryan again.

The book is so well written and Clancy’s narative style is so excellent that you almost don’t notice the real plot failures all the way through. Only now has I sit down to write about it do I realize how bad some of the flaws really were. Basically, the hero of the serise, Jack Ryan entire role in the book is passive and only vaguely related to the main plots. Of those two plots, one where a family defects Russia, happens with so little insident that its almost a let down. The other, where the Pope is shot, adds something interesting to the real life events, but seems so poorly pulled together at the end that its almost seems an afterthought, even though hundreds of pages set it up!