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It must be another Tom Clancy novel. Or maybe not.
The Review: Books
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Against All Enemies is the second successive Clancy military-espionage-terrorism thriller written with a co-author, and the blogosphere resounds with speculation that the former insurance broker didn't even proof the galleys.
Indeed, the detail is numbing and not always believable. A coat that prevents a bullet from even leaving an impact? A former US Navy Seal running at his foes and firing a pistol from each hand? Add wooden dialogue and a leaden plot, and it's easy to think that Clancy farmed out the work to create a character ready-made for films.
That hero is Max Moore, who takes on an unholy alliance between the Taliban and a Mexican drug cartel. He's burdened with a guilty conscience, but the reasons are revealed, irritatingly, only in flashback dribs and drabs every 50 pages or so. Put it this way: he's no Jack Ryan, though at novel's end he seems destined to join the counter- terrorism sphere of Clancy's former US president.
