This is kind of surprising. After a seven-year hiatus following The Teeth of the Tiger, Tom Clancy is delivering two mammoth new spy thrillers within six months of one another. 2010's Dead or Alive, which debuted in hardcover in time for Christmas, doesn't even come out in paperback until September... but that's not stopping Clancy from unleashing another new hardcover novel, Against All Enemies, this summer. Due out June 14, the 768-page novel is co-written with Peter Telep. Dead or Alive was also written with a collaborator (Grant Blackwood); perhaps that's the secret to Clancy suddenly becoming so prolific. In the past, he had collaborated on (or in many cases merely lent his name to) various series of paperback originals, including Op-Center, NetForce and Splinter Cell. (Former James Bond continuation author Raymond Benson penned the original novel in that series and a follow-up, Operation: Barracuda, under the pen name of David Michaels.) But Dead or Alive marked the first occasion on which the author collaborated on a book in his signature Jack Ryan series. It's unclear right now whether or not Against All Enemies is set in the Ryan Universe, though it is definitely a hardcover being billed as a Clancy original, and not part of one of those other series. (The only other hardcover, fictional novel Clancy had previously collaborated on was Red Storm Rising, an adaptation of a videogame he conceived, and not part of the Ryan oeuvre.) Borders offers the following description:
CIA agent Max Moore is a man on a mission. An unholy alliance between Islamic terrorists and Mexican drug cartels threatens the safety of America's southern border. Moore's new team has to infiltrate the warring cartels in order to uncover the plot, but doing that is next to impossible when there's a war on America's doorstep.Whether it's a Jack Ryan story or not, this certainly sounds like vintage Clancy. (Sort of like Clear and Present Danger meets The Sum of All Fears, in fact.) And a vintage Clancy title, too (recalling Richard Clarke's seminal book of the same name on the War on Terror). Actually, I'm surprised he hadn't used it already! So while the next Jack Ryan movie remains in limbo (as reported yesterday), Clancy fans can at least get their fix in print—and plenty of it.
Read more about Against All Enemies here.
