Full Force and Effect

January 5, 2015
In Greaney's meticulously researched and exciting second contribution to the Jack Ryan franchise (after Tom Clancy Support and Defend), Ryan, now the U.S. president with two more years to go in his second term, learns that Choi Ji-hoon, North Korea's supreme leader, has embarked on a program of using his immensely valuable deposits of rare earth minerals to fund the development of a nuclear-tipped ICBM capable of reaching the continental U.S. The job of investigating and stopping this effort falls to the secret organization known as "The Campus," one of whose chief agents is the president's son, Jack Ryan Jr. The action shifts smoothly among the various plot lines, including the North Korean missile program headed by Lt. Gen. Ri Tae-jin, the rare earth mining effort under the directorship of Hwang Min Ho, and the take-down of Sharps Global Intelligence Partners, a U.S. security firm working for the North Koreans. The sympathetic portrayal of many of the characters opposed to America adds depth.