I’ve started reading the last Tom Clancy, The Bear and The Dragon, to satisfy my guilty techno-thriller craving. I’m only a fraction of the way in (it’s bloody huge), but first impressions-
You can’t stop reading it, you need to know how it’s all going to pan out. The good news is it looks likely to be another large-ish conflict at the end, just based upon the characters being set up, rather than the nasty anti climax of Rainbow Six. The bad news is you get more than the usual Clancy editorialising through characters- a depiction of the Chinese which isn’t quite racist but is certainly xenophobic, some unnecessary homophobia, dismissals of ecological concerns in ways which would sound stupid to anyone but an oil baron and regular slagging of Clinton (despite the fact that in Clancy’s universe, ol’ Bill never even made it into the White House.)
I’m still going to read all the way to the end though.