Good day all, Angry Webmaster here with a book review. Today I’m reviewing Tom Clancy’s Against All Enemies.

I’m sorry to say, I hated this book. I was barely able to finish it which would be highly unusual for a Tom Clancy novel, except this ISN’T a Tom Clancy novel. As far as I can tell, about the only part of this book that Mr. Clancy had anything to do with was signing his name on the check and allowing his name to be used on the cover.

This book was “Co-written” by Peter Telep. From what I can tell it was completely written by Peter Telep. It is 800 pages of meandering drek with multiple plot lines, none of which actually work.

Lets start with the format of the book. This book is 800 pages long. It could easily have been 600 pages just by changing the page layouts. A huge amount of space was wasted by the publishers, no doubt so they could jack up the price.

The writing was mediocre at best. You had several plot lines running together that really had no connection to each other. The central plot was a former Navy Seal working with a multi-agency task force to go after the Mexican drug cartels. There was also another plot line involving Islamic Terrorists planning to shoot down American civilian airliners inside the United States. Here is the second major problem.

The author should have concentrated on either the Islamic terrorists or the drug cartels, not both. The whole thing looks a mess. There were numerous gun fights, torture scenes and the nationwide surface to air missile attacks by the RIF’s. ((Radical Islamic Fundamentalists)) None of the original Clancy characters were in the book and the attention to technical detail that Tom Clancy is noted for was missing.

It took me over a month to wade through this book and there were several times I thought I would just give up. It’s obvious to me that Tom Clancy has run out of things to write about and has turned over his “world” to other authors. What a shame.

I remember Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October. I have a first edition from the Naval Institute Press. ((This was the first best seller for the NIP in their history)) That was the book that created an entire new genre of fiction called the “Techno-Thriller.” The attention to detail actually caused a minor panic in the Pentagon. Generals and Admirals wanted to know how Tom Clancy got all the information he did. A quick investigation showed it was all in the public domain. President Ronald Reagan read the book and announced that he enjoyed the book at a televised press conference, calling it “unputdown-able” and a “perfect yarn.”

This started a major publishing trend for Mr. Clancy. I’m sorry to see that this trend has ended on such a note as this pile of toilet paper.

As you can probably guess by now, I do NOT recommend this book.

Thank you.

~The Angry (and disappointed) Webmaster~