Executive Orders (Tom Clancy)

The President is deadand the weight, literally, of the world falls on Jack Ryans shoulders, in Tom Clancys newest and most extraordinary novel. I dont know what to do. Wheres the manual, the training course, for this job? Whom do I ask? Where do I go?Debt of Honorended with Tom Clancys most shocking conclusion ever; a joint session of Congress destroyed, the President dead, most of the Cabinet and the Congress dead, the Supreme Court and the Joint Chiefs likewise. Dazed and confused, the man who only minutes before had been confirmed as the new Vice-President of the United States is told that he is now President. President John Patrick Ryan. And that is whereExecutive Ordersbegins. Ryan had agreed to accept the vice-presidency only as a caretaker for a year, an force, Ryans responsibilities crush on him. He must calm an anxious and grieving nation, allay the skepticism of the worlds leaders, conduct a swift investigation of the tragedy, and arrange a massive state funeralall while attempting to reconstitute a Cabinet and a Congress with the greatest possible speed. But that is not all. Many eyes are on him now, and many of them are unfriendly. In Beijing, Tehran, and other world capitals, including Washington D.C., there are those eager to take advantage where they may, some of whom bear a deep animus toward the United Statessome of whom, from Ryans past, harbor intense animosity toward the new President himself. Soon they will begin to move on their opportunities; soon they will present Jack Ryan with a crisis so big even he cannot imagine it. Tom Clancy has written remarkable novels before, but nothing comparable to the timelinessate plotting that are his hallmarks, it attests to the words of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: This man can tell a story.