Set in the shattered remains of the former Yugoslavia, Maden's second Jack Ryan Jr. novel in the Clancy franchise (after 2017's Point of Contact) struggles to give a coherent picture of the politics of that troubled region. Characters repeatedly fall back on some variation of the phrase "It's confusing," and it's doubtful that even Clancy himself could have explained it any better than Maden. Jack Ryan Sr. is now the U.S. president, and son Jack Jr. has taken over series hero duties as an employee of his dad's old secret organization, the Campus. Sent to Bosnia on a job for a cover organization affiliated with the Campus, Jack Jr. agrees to try to find Bosnian Muslim Aida Curic at the request of his physician mother. In 1992, 25 years earlier, his mother saved the life of then three-year-old Aida. While searching for Aida in Sarajevo, Jack runs across the Iron Syndicate, a nefarious secret agency whose various political factions are conspiring to use a false flag operation to trick the world powers into starting WWIII. Only a nostalgic love of these aging characters will induce readers to plow through the formulaic plot to the unsurprising ending. Agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, WME. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Clancy's thriller industry lives on in this Jack Ryan Jr. adventure by Maden.Vladimir Vasilev heads the Iron Syndicate, an international criminal enterprise, and he's dying of cancer. Even bad guys have bucket lists, and his fondest wish is to have Jack Jr.'s head cut off and delivered to him. When Jack, a financial analyst, travels to the Balkans on business, his eye-surgeon mother, Cathy, asks him to look up a former patient, Aida Curic, in Sarajevo. Then the hit woman Elena Iliescu tries first to charm and then kill Jack. She goes one-for-one. "I'm just a guy who can throw a punch," he says later. People wonder why anyone wants to kill him, while others muse that there's "no way to keep Jack safe short of locking him up." He eventually finds the gorgeous (of course) Aida, a secular Muslim who runs a tour business and a refugee aid organization. They hit it off well enough that Jack almost falls in love. Oddly, no one in the story ever seems to associate Junior with Senior, who occupies the White House. Jack says his name is common in America, but some character might at least comment that he shares a famous name with or that he looks rather like the American president. Anyway, the stakes are high, with the Iron Syndicate hoping to incite World War 3 because "mafias thrive in wartime." So they plan to vaporize thousands of people in a stadium using "122-millimeter thermobaric missiles fixed on the new T-14 Armata chassis." In the Adriatic Sea, the USS Garza has GM/UGM-109E (TLAM-Block IV) Tomahawk cruise missiles, but they may be too late. There's plenty of action, but readers looking for gore will have to settle for Bulgarian body parts in a kimchi jar and a poor fellow "shreddedlike creamed chipped beef."Fast-moving and exciting, this one reads like it came from Clancy himself. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

In this latest in the series, which builds on characters created by Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan Jr. has a target on his back, and he's not aware that a ruthless group will stop at nothing to see him killed. Ryan is planning a trip to Europe when his mother asks him for a favor. Twenty-five years earlier, she saved the sight of a young girl but eventually lost track of her. Could Jack search for her when in Sarajevo and find out how she has fared for all these years? He can't say no to his mom, but, from the moment he starts digging for this little girl, now a woman, he makes himself an easy target for those wanting to eliminate him. Of course, when he finally meets the woman, he is immediately smitten. As in Tom Clancy Point of Contact (2017), Maden gives Clancy's characters his own spin. The result is a fan thriller that will appeal not only to Clancy devotees but also to fans of international suspense fiction in general. The franchise is in fine hands.--Jeff Ayers Copyright 2019 Booklist