🔴🛩️ Red Winter 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 am continuing with my quest to read nearly everything in the Tom Clancy Jack Ryan universe. This is the latest. And I am tired. I am not up for something more lofty. Just give me this.

What is it?

Category	Value
Title	Red Winter
Author	Marc Cameron
Year Published	2022
Format	Kindle
Pages	430
ASIN	B09TNPLSV6

Publisher Summary

1985

A top secret F117 aircraft crashes into the Nevada desert. The Nighthawk is the most advanced fighting machine in the world and the Soviets will do anything to get their hands on its secrets.

In East Berlin, a mysterious figure contacts the CIA with an incredible offer—invaluable details of his government’s espionage plans in return for asylum.

It’s an offer they can’t pass up…if it’s genuine, but the risks are too great to blindly stumble into a deal. With the East German secret police closing in, someone will have to go to behind the Berlin Wall to investigate the potential defector. It’s a job Deputy Director James Greer can only trust to one man—Jack Ryan.

Ryan is a former Marine and a brilliant CIA analyst who’s been the architect of some of the CIA’s biggest coups but this time he’s in enemy territory with a professional assassin on his tail. Can he get the right answers before the Cold War turns into a Red Winter?

How did I read it?

Category	Value
Date Started	October 4, 2024
Date Finished	November 25, 2024
Places Read	Lisbon, Sintra, Berlin, Brussels

Notes - No Spoilers

• Honestly super fun to see the beginnings of relationships between some of the key characters in the Jack Ryan universe. I loved it. I (obviously) have spent a lot of time with these characters over the last couple of years and it was delightful to follow those stories. I get it - this is a sentimental flashback - but I loved it.
• In this novel, Jack Ryan speaks with the “certitude of a thiry-four-year-old who’d seen bad things and made it out the other side.” And this implies 34 is still young!
• Multiple references to being in the cold made me happy, given one of my favorite novels of all time is The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
• I read a chunk of this in Berlin! Which was super fun.