Tag: dead or alive

Finished Dead or Alive this weekend.

The latest Tom Clancy – and I hadn’t noticed until I actually had the book that it had ‘With Grant Blackwood’ in the title.  Anyway, at 950 pages Dead or Alive is a honking big book… and it probably should have been cut up into three separate books of about 275 pages each.  And I don’t mean just hacking up the book into three roughly identical pieces and rebinding them, either.  There were three simultaneous plotlines going on (military, political, espionage).  Each plot needed its own book.  Done right, it would have been highly innovative.

As to the book itself: for 950 pages it wasn’t a bad read – but watching Clancy have to contort more and more around the alternate timeline of the Jack Ryan universe is kind of weird.

Book of the Week: Dead or Alive.

Yes, yes, Dead or Alive is a 850 page Tom Clancy novel, and it’d probably stand to be cut down about three hundred pages because nobody wants to tell Tom Clancy that he shouldn’t write 850 page novels. Including, apparently, me, because I’m going to read the blessed thing. I’m obviously weak that way.

And so ends the reign of The High King of Montival.