Tom Clancy used to write well, but somewhere along the way, he lost it. Everything up to Without Remorse was pretty good, but then it started going downhill pretty fast. Debt of Honor was interesting to read because it deals heavily with Japan, which I am very familiar with. Predictably, he got tons of stuff wrong, but surprisingly little right when it came to characterizing Japan and the Japanese. He even has the prime minister saying of Jack Ryan at one point, “He is a samurai.” Please.

Executive Orders continued the slide. Clancy should stick to military fiction, not political; he embarrasses himself in this book. Rainbow Six returned to John Clark, but unsuccessfully; the book starts with Clark and another commando on their way to England to start an anti-terrorist group–and their plane just happens to get hijacked. It gets worse from there. The Bear And The Dragon was just plain unreadable, with the battle scenes, which Clancy once wrote with aplomb, uninteresting and just plain confusing.

So now Clancy has come out with another new book, The Teeth of the Tiger (at least I assume he wrote it–there are so many books with his name big on the cover but really he just authorized other authors to write them). I’m not even going to read this one secondhand or even if it’s loaned to me, not unless I hear reviews that claim that Clancy has made a miraculous comeback or something. Doesn’t look like it.