Synopsis
When a member of his Cabinet is killed in a plane crash, President Jack Ryan suspects that the “accident” is anything but in this latest shocking entry in this #1 New York Times bestselling series.
The White House is stunned when the Secretary of Commerce is killed in a plane crash in Turkey. President Jack Ryan isn’t ready to write this off as a simple accident. Not only has he lost a good friend, but the Secretary was on an important mission: on the surface he was making an appearance at an economic conference, but the CIA was also using the flight as cover to extract an important asset from the Middle East.
Soon, Lt. Commander Katie Ryan and her team are working with the investigators to find the cause of the tragedy, but one shocking revelation changes everything. There were supposed to be 16 people on the plane, but there are only 15 bodies.
The quest for answers will lead the team deeper and deeper into a quagmire of lies and deception that will force President Ryan to face an unprincipled enemy with global ambitions.
Review
Reading a Tom Clancy Estate book is like escaping into an alternate universe these days. Populated with smart and heroic government officials, skilled operators who go above and beyond the call of duty in largely positive ways, and an intelligent, honest President of the United States who values expertise, loves his family and his country in equal measures, and who has a strong moral backbone, these books paint an incredibly optimistic – some might even say naïve – portrait of a high-functioning American government that simply doesn’t exist in our current measles and diarrhea parasite-laden reality.
Writing for the Clancy estate this time around is Ward Larsen. Like James Bond’s George Lazenby, Larsen’s a one-and-doner, filling in a gap left by the departure of the Andrews & Wilson writing team and the hand-off to M.P. Woodward, who picks up the reins in November with The Coldest War.
Picking up shortly after Andrews & Wilson’s Executive Power, Rules of Engagement finds Naval Intelligence Officer Katie Ryan investigating a plane crash in Turkey that has left the Secretary of Commerce dead. Oddities begin piling up in quick order when Katie uncovers evidence of a CIA jet in the area and a passenger manifest that shows a single unrecovered passenger amongst the victims.
Larsen does a fine job piling up incongruities to trouble Katie, along with her father, President Jack Ryan, cyber-sleuth brother Kyle, and the usual cast of series staples, like black ops killers John Clark and Ding Chavez. In true Clancy fashion, he reveals very small pieces of the puzzle that only add up later, like a former Russian intelligence officer recruiting prisoners for an unusual job.
Although several of the older characters, Jack Ryan in particular, grumble about how much easier, cleaner, and neater things were back in the low-tech 1980s, Rules of Engagement at times feels like a Cold War thriller despite it’s five minutes into the future technology that makes asymmetrical warfare and cyberterrorism all the more dangerous. Much of this is due, of course, to the resurgent threat of Russia and the various cat-and-mouse games played between a Russian spy-cum-terrorist and US intelligence agencies and their boots on the ground.
Where Rules of Engagement suffers, though, is with Larsen’s handling of Katie and Kyle Ryan. Under Andrews & Wilson, Kyle was clearly neurodivergent, a high-functioning autistic, which gave him a credible bit of character shading and the kind of representation you don’t typically see in this genre. Larsen, unfortunately, largely ignores this aspect of Kyle’s dimensionality with his portrayal of the youngest member of the Ryan clan.
Katie, meanwhile, is severely underutilized. While she has a knack for thinking outside the box and spotting irregularities others might miss, Larsen can’t quite figure out what to do with her after she discovers a CIA plane early in the proceedings. Her role as an investigator in a plane crash should put her in her element, allowing her to play detective, but instead she’s mostly told things by her commanding officer rather than discovering them for herself. Eventually, Larsen gives up on even trying to find interesting things for her to do. First, he turns into a nursemaid for an injured officer, then relegates her to being a traffic director for an overseas op after she returns Stateside, and then forgets about her entirely. When Andrews & Wilson reintroduced Katie as an aged-up naval officer in Act of Defiance, I found myself immediately taken by her brains, capabilities, and quirks. She very quickly earned her spot in this incredibly long-running series and proved without a doubt that she truly is Jack Ryan’s daughter. It’s a shame to see her sidelined by here, leaving me to hope that Woodward does better by her in the next installment. Perhaps one of these days, the Clancy estate can get around to hiring a woman writer to pen some Katie Ryan books… Obviously, we can’t expect such a presumably head-explodingly controversial book to arrive here in 2026, but maybe one day!
I also must take a few issues with Larsen’s deification of artificial intelligence. While Jack Ryan, et al are clearly impressed by Kyle’s cyber team and their admittedly impressive sci-fi-esque software, I have a hard time swallowing the technological jingoism given all the real-world concerns of A.I., which Larsen ignores in favor whizz bang wows. Reading about the gussied-up capabilities of Cyber Cell 6’s MAADN system (which is not actually an ode to John Madden but maybe should be) left me feeling not even the least bit patriotic but even more leery and concerned about what such technology might be capable of in the hands of our real-world authoritarian regime under Trump. Although readers are intended to view the cyber-works under the auspices of competency porn and a win for the white hats of the Ryan administration, it’s also a potent warning about the real-world dangers of such all-powerful, far-reaching technology in the hands of an increasingly invasive government wherein democracy is in daily decline. It’s hard to feel victorious and proud about a technology that, even in its lesser and error-prone real-world form, is already being used by ICE jackboots to capture and kill whoever they want with zero repercussion, the encroachment of mass surveillance data centers to suck up all the land, water, and power of our neighborhoods, demands for Internet users to submit government IDs to access websites, and the proliferation of Flock cameras and aerial drones to allow the police to stalk women all across the nation.
While there are numerous reasons to be wary of artificial intelligence in our bookish lives, its most damning fictional allocation is in the use as a deux ex machina, as Larsen exhibits in the book’s finale. The Hyperion project unleashed in the book’s climax is downright horrifying, but even scarier is the prospect of such technology existing and making its way into the hands of militarized law enforcement to use against protestors or anybody else whose skin color is dark enough to be deemed threatening.
Rules of Engagement is an easy page-turner, but while it’s gentle and unchallenging as can be for readers, it’s equally so for its characters, which is a shame. While tension isn’t exactly absent throughout, Larsen somehow manages to make the high stakes plans at the book’s core feel somehow small. There’s never any sense that even our most skilled operators are in danger of losing their lives during critical engagements, or the illusion that the US just might not save the day after all. Some of this comes down to the peril of estate writing. With all these characters frozen in time (I mean, c’mon… Jack Ryan has been president for what, 20 years now?), the writers can’t really shake up the central pillars of this series so that these books and the people that populate them can live on into perpetuity. Nobody’s in danger, and none of them can really change or grow as human beings. A nuclear bomb won’t be set off at the Super Bowl and nobody will be flying an airliner into the White House or demolishing the East Wing to build a garish ballroom. In the end, they’re all just cartoon characters like The Simpsons or South Park, stuck in second grade forever and ever, amen. At the end of the day, the writers have to put all their toys back in the box so the next author can have their turn playing. Some estate writers, like Mark Greaney and Andrews & Wilson, can sell it completely. Larsen can’t, at least not entirely, but it’s not bad overall.
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