By going back 21 years, Clancy provides a fresh adventure for a young Jack Ryan, but Ryan fans (and presumably Ben Affleck) may be surprised to learn that Ryan is, until the final scenes, only a supporting player here. What comes in between is a slow-moving but, given Clancy's astonishing flair for fly-on-the-wall writing, steadily absorbing imagining of the back story behind Mehmet Ali Agca's (real-life) failed attempt on the life of Pope John II in 1981. But what chance does a novice CIA analyst have against a cat-and-mouse game between the world's two great superpowers?Publishers WeeklyThere's not a shot fired until page 602 in Clancy's lumbering new thriller, and readers up on their history will know the outcome of that shot on page 17. Ryan must battle first to verify the plot, and then to stop it. Debriefing a high-level Russian defector, however, he comes across an unbelievable plot: top Soviet officials, including Yuri Andropov, are planning to assassinate Pope John Paul II. They offer him his first job as a freelance analyst, and he readily accepts. But a series of nasty encounters with an IRA splinter group has brought Ryan to the attention of the CIA's Deputy Director and his British counterpart. Jack Ryan's first days with the CIA may be the Pope's last days alive.It is very early in Jack Ryan's career - so early that he has not yet even become an analyst for the CIA.
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