Title: Tom Clancy’s Oath of Office
Author: Marc Cameron
Reviewed by: Samantha Keogh
Review made possible by: Penguin Random House South Africa
Tom Clancy may have died in 2013, but his characters live on thanks to the guardianship of several authors, including Marc Cameron.
Clancy was perhaps best known for the attention to detail he invested in his research and the accuracy (as far as can be ascertained) of his descriptions of the weapons and fighting men and women his characters emulate in his works.
This is a trait which Cameron, a retired chief deputy US Marshal, has inherited and adopted as his credo to provide a credible narrative in Oath of Office.
Clancy would not have had it otherwise.
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President Jack Ryan is faced, on the home front, with myriad natural disasters and a senator who is determined to discredit him and his administration.
Abroad he must take into consideration, among other things, growing anti-regime protests in Iran, Russian troop and naval movements towards the Ukrainian border and an apparent civil rights champion whose real agenda is aimed at igniting a nuclear conflagration.
Meanwhile, Jack Ryan Jr, the president’s son and a clandestine operator in his own right, teams up with a Russian CIA-equivalent SVR agent, Erik Dovzhenko, who suspects his masters may want to kill him on sight.
Also on the Russian’s tail is an Iranian secret policeman intent on discrediting him for having a suspected affair with an unmarried woman who, faced with capture, torture and a slow death, takes her own life.
Together – and separately – they track a beautiful woman assassin after a drone observes her shoot a French arms dealer under the noses of his bodyguards – and walk away unchallenged.
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Interest remains riveted throughout and while you know good will triumph over evil, you might be surprised at exactly which is which.
Here is a tightly-written page-turner which roller-coaster plot and sub-plots will keep readers guessing until the last sentence – a yarn wrapped into a strong skein that’s well worth unraveling.
