Don Bentley. Tom Clancy: Target Acquired. Putnam, 2021.

The latest Jack Ryan, Jr., novel from the Clancy estate will keep readers turning its pages. The action is nearly nonstop. At most, the whole 419 pages covers three days in the life of Jack Ryan, Jr. It might only be two days because it is not really clear how long Ryan is sedated.

Except for the fact that Ryan is a trained spy, this has a Hitchcock ring to it. Hitchcock said that he liked stories in which an ordinary person meets up with extraordinary circumstances. That is sort of what happens to Ryan. He is minding his own business, more or less, at a café in Tel Aviv when he sees a man try to kill a mother and her seven-year-old son. He leaps into action and saves the woman, but the man gets away and Jack gets hustled into the offices of Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service.

He is told that the best thing to do is leave. He plans to, but first he wants to return the Captain America action figure that the boy dropped in the scuffle. Guess what? A second time he manages to save the woman from the same Asian assassin. It is not enough. She and the boy get kidnapped by what looks likes a European gang.

He befriends a Shin Bet officer and is himself captured by Russians. Or are they Iranian? It seems the Chinese, the Russians, and the Iranians all have an interest in this American woman. What’s the deal?

We also meet some other American operatives who are in the Middle East on official business. There is a Special Forces group keeping an eye on a Syrian fortress. It has been set up to house a Shi’ite doomsday cult, but then a high ranking Iranian general appears on the scene. Gen. Farhad Ahmadi sounds like a fictional stand-in for General Soleimani, the Iranian mastermind and assassin who was himself assassinated in 2020.

The cult leader, like the title character from Rosenberg’s The Twelfth Imam, claims to be the reincarnation of the Shi’ite Twelfth Imam, but he is portrayed more like a sequestered David Koresh rather than the international Messiah figure of Rosenberg’s novel. Still, the Iranian general seems to believe in him, or at least in his usefulness to Tehran.

There is also a small F-35 fighter group from America involved in training exercises that suddenly become more real as Iranian surrogates launch missiles that ignore or pass through the famed Israeli Iron Dome.

Jack Ryan, Jr., may have turned into Jack Bauer, but the tale is a fun to read, even if the plotlines have become boilerplate. And alas, the politics may be all too real. As Jack Ryan observes after he is told that one of the men who attempted to kill the American woman is Chinese:

“The U.S. lobbied for the Chinese to be granted membership in the World Trade Organization back in the nineties. [N.B.: I was in China when China was admitted. Americans and Chinese alike were happy about this at the time.] It was supposed to lead them down the path to capitalism. Instead, China’s been buying, copying, bullying, or outright stealing intellectual property from other nations ever since. Far from normalizing the Chinese Communists, the free-trade nations have created an eight-hundred pound gorilla with the buying power of one-point-four billion people.” (160)

While there is a political backdrop, this is mostly a simple action adventure. Target Acquired is Mr. Bentley’s first contribution to the Clancy estate. He even mentions books by Mark Greaney, another Clancy collaborator. I suspect if the “Tom Clancy” novels keep coming, this will not be Mr. Bentley’s last. He knows what is going on and how to tell an entertaining story.