Patriot Games

Tom Clancy (and others) wrote an excellent series - Jack Ryan. Buy all 37 books today. This book was part of an order. All books were new and arrived in pristine condition. Great job!!

The book was enjoyable to read, and it kept you reading throughout the book. I decided to read this book because it was the next book in the Jack Ryan series after The Hunt for Red October. This book did not exceed my expectations because The Hunt for Red October was my favorite. However, Patriot Games is still a very well-written book while not meeting my expectations. Tom Clancy's book takes place in London and America and tells the story through the eyes of a veteran of the armed services, Jack Ryan. Tom Clancy was very good at keeping track of events at this time, so the book could be as realistic as possible while still keeping it interesting. He uses radical terrorist groups of the time, current people in power, and political views to keep the book realistic. People that like Jason Bourne, Jack Reacher, and other Tom Clancy books will enjoy Patriot Games. I would say that Patriot Games is a more mature book because of the language and some of the graphic imagery that Clancy is known for. Overall, a great book that most people would like.

This is the first book I’ve seen typos in and none of the chapters or sub-chapters were separated. Interrupted the flow while reading.

Typically Clancy, the action is non-stop, the characters are completely believable, and the good guys even win in the end.Wish I'd read the book before watching the movie, though.

It's interesting to revisit a key bestseller that you first read over 30 years ago. This is the first in the Tom Clancy's long-running series about Jack Ryan, which has even been continued after Clancy's recent death via the pen of Mark Greaney.Jack Ryan is visiting London on vacation with his eye surgeon wife Catherine and 4-year-old daughter Sally when they find themselves close to a terrorist attack by the Ulster Liberation Army on a Rolls Royce driving through St James Park. After the terrorists have blown up the front of the car with a grenade they start moving in firing machine guns, intent on capturing the people in the back of the car. In seconds, Ryan tackles one of the attackers and kills another but is seriously injured. He didn't realise until later that the occupants of the car are the Prince and Princess of Wales and their infant son.This fantasy opening makes Ryan and his family close friends to the Royal Family and the Queen gives him an honorary Knighthood for his bravery. While the captured Irish terrorist Sean Miller is given life imprisonment, with the help of the ULA he escapes when being moved to a high-security prison. Miller vows that he will eliminate Ryan and capture the Prince.The rest of the book details Ryan's determination to find Miller and defeat the ULA and to do this he reluctantly accepts an invitation to work at the CIA. Miller pops up again in the US, targeting Catherine and Jack. Later on, he continues his vendetta against Ryan and the Prince with a stunning bloody gunfight at the end.I enjoyed going back to the start of the Jack Ryan saga and to read Clancy when he was at the top of his form. Some aspects of the book are dated (for example, terrorism was considered to always have political motives) and technology is fairly primitive. My main reservation is that Clancy's writing style is pretty ponderous and detailed. In those days, we expected blockbuster novels to be 800 pages but now we would expect this kind of story to be a compelling 400-500 page-turner.My other reservation is Clancy's inclusion of real people in the plot in fictitious situations, especially the Royal Family. He also has poor understanding of Royal protocols - calling the Duke of Edinburgh "My Lord" and the Prince "Your Highness".Many of you will have seen the movie of the book starring Harrison Ford and Anne Archer. I suggest that you read the book because the finale when Ryan finally catches up with Miller is very different and shows Clancy's forethought in making Ryan the kind of character he becomes in later books.As pointed out by several reviewers the conversion to an e-book has not been done well with no breaks between different sections of the action making some parts difficult to follow.

Great read. Second time around. Could not put it down. I recommend it all needing excitement and adventure. On to the next one.

Tom has the best ability to weave technical reality into the story so that it enhances the suspense w/o engulfing the reader .

I have started to read this book mainly because after I played a couple of games that take Tom Clancy's name, I became interested to know what sort of stories he told in his books. After doing a bit of research on the main themes, the focus on the Cold War, secret services and military themes sounded very promising. I mean, if dozens of games and movies based on Tom Clancy's books were released, one would suppose that they did have something to catch your interest, no?Unfortunately, I think that I expected too much from his older book and Patriot Games ended up not captivating me very much. Maybe I was expecting something more thrilling and a better elaborated plot, but it really, really, felt like watching cliché action movies with several moments of tedious nothingness. I mean, literally, during more than half of the book, absolutely NOTHING happens. And it really saddened me, because the first, say, 20 pages of the book were absolutely awesome, with a lot of action. It was naive of me to think that this rhythm was going to be kept through the more than 500 pages of the book. Of course, Patriot Games does have its share of frenetic action, but the interval between them is so long that the investigation parts didn't really hold my interest for too long. After a while, I started to think that the good parts of the book were actually the romantic scenes between Jack and Cathy.There are tons of characters in the book and I find it amazing that pretty much all of them have a military background. Okay, Jack was once a Mariner, it should be kinda obvious that most of his contacts had a common background. But if you look carefully, there is not a single character in the book (besides the women) who doesn't have a military background, and the "coincidences" really bothered me.The same goes for the multiple-view narrative. Clancy wanted to show both sides of the coin, but in the end, the villains were essentially evil people while all the other characters were support-good guys who praised Jack Ryan for his brave efforts in every single page. It was either this or Jack stating that "no, I'm nothing. You're the one who's awesome".I still want to give a second chance for other Tom Clancy's books. Maybe it's just the fact that this is one of the first books he ever wrote. I want to believe that his writing skills improved as time went by.

Natürlich habe ich den Film gesehen - wer nicht?? Insofern ist das Buch wirklich eine sehr gute Ergänzung, vor allem die Geschichte um die irische Widerstandsgruppe ist besser erzählt als im Film. - Der Schluß ist aber nicht ganz so gut wie im Film - da geht's noch ganz anders ab. Nichtsdestoweniger habe ich lange Zeit an diesem Buch gesessen und konnte mich nicht davon lösen. Sehr empfehlenswert!

Always loved the films, now the series, the book? Doesn’t disappoint, a really enjoyable read, I highly recommend to anyone

Having thoroughly enjoyed The Hunt for Red October and been so impressed with the writing I was keen to read more Tom Clancy. I had to wait a year or more before early Clancy novels became available on Kindle and I chose Patriot Games on the basis of other reviews. It wasn't what I was expecting. It's a good thriller but nothing special. It took a long time to get under way with far too long spent on stereotypical descriptions of Britain for an American audience. The detail was excellent, typical Clancy, but implausible situations and an uncharacteristic decision by one of the bad guys really let it down for me. I'll try another one of his and hope I find it more like Red October.

Well written and holds your attention from start to finish. Had to buy the kindle edition as I can no longer hold the books I have.

good book