Contemporary Literary Criticism | Clancy, Tom - Ross Thomas (review date 2 August 1987)

Ross Thomas (review date 2 August 1987)

SOURCE: "White Knight, Green Villains," in New York Times Book Review, August 2, 1987, p. 11.

[In the following review, Thomas offers a favorable review of Patriot Games.]

Just after Jack Ryan, a 31-year-old American tourist and former Marine officer, joins his doctor wife and 4-year-old daughter in a park on the very first day of his first visit to London, he hears an explosion. Or "BOOM!" as Tom Clancy puts it. Two heavily armed men are attacking a just disabled Rolls-Royce. Ryan automatically classifies them as Irish Republican Army terrorists and instinctively, or at least without mulling it over much, blindsides, disarms and cripples one of them and kills the other, but not before being wounded himself in a shootout that takes place within hailing distance of Buckingham Palace.

Upon waking in a hospital, Ryan learns that the limousine's passengers were none other than the Prince of...

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