Full Force and Effect: A Jack Ryan Novel

I have become a fan of Mark Greaney and enjoy reading the books that he has written under the Tom Clancy syndicate. Most of his books up to this point have been middle range books that have had good intrigue and lots of action. This is what I would consider a more daunting longer read epic in the style that Clancy made famous.The story is well conceived and well written. It has that overarching epic feel of a huge political situation that has multiple fronts and threats that have to be analyzed an dealt with. The main gist of the story is that North Korea has a new leader, the son of the previous dictator. This son wants to accomplish what his father started by getting ICBM missiles with nuclear warheads that can reach the west coast of the United States and thus push the U.S. to listen up to North Korea and consider them a world power.To do this they need cash. To get cash they have to find a new way to produce income. Lucky for them the worlds largest deposit of rare earth minerals is found in their own back yard. This mining operation could produce 12 trillion dollars of income for the regime. That is enough money to buy everything they need to go nuclear.Thus the Campus is on the trail of what is going on as well as the CIA and DNI Mary Foley. All the characters are coming together to try and determine the best way to stop North Korea from getting this funding online. President Ryan wants this stopped. Thus he is willing to step out on a limb and handle sanctions against North Korea even against the wishes of other nations.This epic tale is current to todays political climate. It is ripped right from our front pages. Maybe the only stretch is the rare earth mining issue, but that just adds to the intrigue of the book.Greaney does a masterful job of weaving this story together and providing plenty of little sub-plots to help you learn more about the characters involved and the dynamics of how espionage works in todays corporate and political world.You will enjoy every once of the book. So, why did I only give it four stars you ask? Well, because I think that as a larger epic piece under the Clancy name it still didn't have the gripping power of the Clancy style for this longer work. It's close and with more time of development Greaney will get there, just not completely this time. BUT, that doesn't detract from a great story.Enjoy!

I’ve read many Clancy (and the other authors who write his books) and this one was entertaining and well written. Gave it 4 stars as it didn’t captivate as some of the others, but really it’s pretty good. I’m always surprised and impressed at how on-point and timely the premise of these books are.

I like the book. I won't spoil on it. I have everything Clancy ever published as well as all of the Greaney / Clancy books. Greaney is no Clancy. But the Campus characters from the last Clancy books live on in the Greaney books and that's why I buy them. I'm ex-military and I keep up. It was always obvious Clancy knew his facts about the military. Although Clancy made a couple of subtle errors in his books, Greaney had me scratching my head a few times while reading this book alone. Not identifying the class of ship the Navy uses as it's primary platform in this book, or it's unique configuration and suitability for its mission, is a Greaney thing. Clancy wouldn't have done that. You'd have known all about the U.S.S. Freedom. SEALs carrying M4A1 SOPMODs in one op and HK416s in their next (similar) op didn't make sense to me. And using C-141s to transport anything these days just wouldn't happen. The last C-141 was retired in 2006.There is plenty of the now-standard jumping around from location to location, but I detected an increased propensity for sequencing that wasn't linear. By that I mean that an action sequence would be described from one perspective, but the other perspective would not be interspersed during the sequence. Generally speaking it's easier, in my opinion, to follow these sequences when both perspectives are interspersed. You know...A did this, B did this, A did this, B reacted this way, and so on. In Full Force sequences are described both ways, so you'll know what all of this means if you read this review before the book.A bigger problem for me was that many of the conversations and supporting plot points were glossed over, abbreviated, implied, or just left to imagination. Clancy books were great because the reader was trusted to absorb what the characters were saying and doing and the reader trusted the author to include details that developed the characters and their interactions. There is some of this in Full Force, but not as much as I would have liked. No examples but if you read the book I think you'll get the idea. There were several parts of the book that made me think that Greaney was rushed to finish so the story was not told with consistent levels of detail or plot points were left off to make the book shorter. Maybe the editor got to it. Either way at 674 pages it's a brute, but it still left me feeling like I wanted more.So the book is not perfect, but it if you're at all like me you'll enjoy it because of the cast. Look past the few errors and you'll definitely be wondering when the next one is due to be released.

When I started reading this book, I was expecting to give it a 3 star review. By the time I finished it, I was getting close to 5 stars. It's definitely a slow starter, despite some early action sequences. And it follows the same formula that previous Jack Ryan (senior) books have done; one international threat/crisis, one interlinked domestic threat/crisis, and a lot of intelligence work. It took me a while to realise that my early dissatisfaction with the book was really due to finding the formula, and the expositional build-up to the crises, repetitive.Even though it's a book in the Jack Ryan (senior) series, the book spends a lot of time on Jack Ryan (junior) and his buddies from The Campus. If you haven't read the most recent book in the Ryan junior series -- "Support and Defend" -- then read it before you read "Full Force and Effect", because the latter contains some minor spoilers for the former.When it did get going, though, Mark Greaney handled it pretty well, with a lot of the action, touches, and will-they-won't-they that made Clancy's earlier Ryan books (up to 'Executive Orders') superior to his later ones. I particularly liked a sequence where the Campus guys were scrambling to make a situation look completely normal -- it was almost hilarious in a Keystone Kops/Some Like It Hot fashion. On the other hand, Greaney sometimes overreaches himself; there is one action sequence that occurs in a very public location that is never referred to again after it concludes. There is no way that would happen in real life -- the incident would be all over the newspapers, the police and FBI would throw resources at it, and the guys involved would have to deal with the consequences.The Jack Ryan senior series has been battling two big problems for a while. One is that, now that Ryan is president, it's pretty difficult to give him anything to do beyond sitting in an office and making decisions. The second is that the books try to remain true to the world that they have created as well as being realistic in the real world; so the more books that get written, the more constrained authors are on the plot lines they can choose. I promised this would be a spoiler-free review, so all I will say is that Greaney manages to overcome both of these obstacles in this book well enough to produce an exciting and engaging story.

I have stayed away from Clancy books since the last one he wrote himself, thinking nothing would be the same with the future ones. Seems I was wrong.Lots of separate stories that slowly come together as the books reaches the end, always cleverly done and with few questions left hangingThe characters are getting older, Clarke is in his 60s, Dom must be in his 40s and the youngsters in the team are trying to take up the slack. Not sure anyone will ever be able to fill the void an older Clarke leavesOnly annoyance with this story, was a fairly large loose end in Mexico, but hopefully that will get cleared up in a future book

Mark Greaney continues the Clancy legacy with another strong entry. This does indeed capture the Clancy style of providing both the ‘big picture’ and World Leader level, along with the operatives at the coal face where there is a different sort of danger.In this we have the dastardly North Koreans with a young new dictator, brainwashing their own people while seeking revenge on the West. A very bleak picture is portrayed of life in North Korea and I hope it is exaggerated for the sake of those who live under the regime!While President Ryan deals with the politics and burdens of command, son Jack Jr is at work as a covert operative and their different areas of focus come closer than either of them could possible imagine.This is a slow build, I was reading thinking it was okay but not feeling blown away when almost without me noticing, the book changed gear and I found myself unable to put it down.So it is another winner, the blend of the traditional Clancy style and characters but with a breezy update from Mark Greaney.

As doubtlessly the majority of readers will know, Tom Clancy himself passed away in 2014 but Mark Greaney appears to have inherited his mantle, and he makes a good showing here. As ever, the subject matter is highly topical, this particular story involving North Korea and nuclear weapons. Some reviews appear slightly critical of the ending, which depending on your point of view is either "fast-paced" or "rushed" - I reserve judgement as a society such as North Korea and its extremes may not be subject to the same sort of rationales as other societies. But for this reason I might have given the book 4½ stars instead of 5 - nevertheless I gave it the benefit of the doubt because it was still an engrossing read. Continuity with previous stories is also consistent.

Greaney writes fluently, and stays true to Tom Clancy's knack of writing about topical political issues. Few contemporary crisis centres are ever more topical than North Korea, and as a world political problem, more intractable. Greaney's storyline reflects the common Western view of North Korea, and paints a very bleak picture of a people thoroughly tyrannised by a self-deified absolute dictator. The story moves along, aided by a plausible enough plot, then falls off a cliff at the end. Greaney obviously struggled to end the book, and made the mistake of forgetting everything that he had written before when fashioning a way to bring the story to a conclusion. I found this disappointing, and if a harbinger of things to come, will bring the Clancy franchise to a sad end.