Tom Clancy phones in latest collaboration

Book Review Against All Enemies, with its wooden dialogue and a leaden plot, looks like Tom Clancy farmed out the work to create a one-dimensional character ready-made for films.

Against All Enemies Tom Clancy with Peter Telep Penguin Books Dh123

OSA-1. HY-2. COLREGS. SPECOPS. SGN. HVT. RBU-1200 ASW. MARCOS. GRAIL. HUMINT. ISI. SAD. CONUS. CPB. FCRs.

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.