Tom Clancy, Rainbow Six Review

Overall Rating

Exciting hostage rescue scenes

totally unrealistic plot, ebola virus plot also used in Executive orders.

The book has four or five climaxes. It looks as if Clancy could not make up his mind about a conclusion. The soldiers are portrayed as robots, and he goes into far too much irrelevant detail. His other novels benefitted from attention to detail but the plot lines were always tied to the manouvering of nation statesand in these situations detail was necessary. The idea that an environmentalist would cull the worlds population is not a plausible plot. Rainbow Six is an outright attack on the environmentalist movement and seems too much like a conservative political tract. Clancy has also managed to remove all of the mystery from the character of Clark and has turned him into a mirror of Jack Ryan, albeit with a more relaxed attitude towards violence. According to Clancy, Clarke is now closer to sixty than to fifty. With Jack Ryan around the same age and Domingo Chavez in his early thirties, Clancy seems to be running out of plotlines and characters as the years go by. This book is not up to his usual standard and makes me wonder if he wrote the book to promote the launch of the Rainbow Six computer game franchise.