🚀🛰️ Oath of Office by Marc Cameron

Not a Book Report

I enjoy reflecting on the movies, TV, books and other media that I consume. I’m notoriously sentimental. This series documents the books that I read. These aren’t reviews or recommendations. Just a list. For me. Mostly so that I can page through what I read, where I was, and when.

Why did I read it?

I picked up a Tom Clancy book in the Stockholm Central train station a couple months ago and it made me remember how fun these can be. So I rewound in the series by about a decade and picked up at Book 10 in the run. I have been spending a lot of time wading through some complex, but interesting, challenges at the office - all good problems, but the kinds of things that leave me beat at the end of the day and ready to jump into a novel about spies and special forces for 30 minutes before I fall asleep.

What is it?

Category	Value
Title	Oath of Office
Author	Marc Cameron
Year Published	2018
Format	Kindle
Pages	528
ASIN	B07BJM9FW4

Publisher Summary

Freedom may have finally arrived in Iran. As protests break out across the country, the media rejoices over the so-called Persian Spring. Western leaders are ecstatic. Members of Congress and the Cabinet clamor to back the rebels. Only President Jack Ryan remains wary.

Meanwhile, he has plenty to handle at home. A deadly strain of flu is ravaging the United States as spring floods decimate the Southeast. An unethical senator wants to bring down the Ryan presidency and is willing to lean on fabricated bot-planted stories to do it.

But the scariest story is the most closely guarded one. Two Russian nuclear missiles have been hijacked. The Campus gets their first break when Jack Junior connects with a rogue Russian intelligence officer in Afghanistan—only to be abducted soon after arriving. John Clark and the rest of the Campus team race to track the missiles and rescue their colleague.

As sensationalized stories spin out of control and the stolen missiles remain out of reach, President Ryan’s toughest challenge emerges: How do you meet an enemy head on, when he won’t even show you his face?

How did I read it?

Category	Value
Date Started	May 20, 2024
Date Finished	June 8, 2024
Places Read	Lisbon, Sintra, Praia Grande

Notes - No Spoilers

• This is the second novel from Marc Cameron after Mark Greaney left for his own, Grey Man series. I really, really hated the first Cameron novel and swore I was done with the series.
• Instead, I turned my attention to a list of biographies that The Economist recommended.
• And lord have mercy, they were boring. So I came crawling back to the easy read, dad-lit, books that I know I will breeze through and enjoy in the 20 minutes before I fall asleep each evening.
• This one was better than his first outing. He seems to have course corrected and returned to more of a classic Jack Ryan novel and less of a kind of Punisher knock off.
• Always fun to see characters from old books, especially my perennial favorite Adam Yao (who gets a mention more than an appearance). And of course Ysabel.
• Like the Fast and Furious series, the characters continue to operate less like humans and more like Marvel superheros and Jack Ryan Jr. remains the most guilty of this.