OK, look.
I picked Red Storm Rising because I was trying to remember a passage from it the other day, looked it up, and ended up reading half the book at one sitting. When Tom Clancy was on, he was on – and this was classic ‘conventional WWIII against the Soviet Union’ stuff. But: it is not a goram ‘Jack Ryan novel.’
Sheesh.
And so, adieu to Fugue State.
A perennial favorite–loved it when it was new, and I reread it every few years. When Clancy was still writing the stuff with his name on it, he was great; once we started seeing “Tom Clancy’s Yadda-Yadda, written by Jim Schmuckatelli” it was all over, and the end of the Cold War didn’t do him any favors, story-wise. But he was the perfect storyteller for the Reagan “hey, America’s actually still worth defending” years.
Actually, I’d say everything he wrote post Executive Orders was meh. He had nothing for Jack Ryan to do anymore, fumbled around for a few novels trying to push new main characters, then settled on “Jack Ryan Jr’s inevitable rise”, but even that sputtered out before he passed on.
IMO, definitely his strongest book.
Of course, the Jack Ryan character *really* started abusing the willing suspension of disbelief after a couple of books, and the earlier ones are sullied in retrospect because of it.