Book Review – Tom Clancy’s “The Teeth of the Tiger”
Just the other day I finished reading The Teeth of the Tiger, a novel actually written by Tom Clancy unlike EndWars, which merely had his famous name written on the cover.
As far as this novel went, I could easily tell that it was written by Clancy, but I wish that it wasn’t. It’s not everyday that you can call such a talented and educated author’s piece of work as being garbage, but sadly, this is just such an example.
The Teeth of the Tiger is another novel that takes a look at international terrorism striking here in the U.S. We’ve seen this before in examples such as The Sum of All Fears, Debt of Honor and Rainbow Six, and in those cases Clancy handled the situations nearly flawlessly. But here in The Teeth of the Tiger, Clancy only gets partial credit for his work.
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In this book we have a main terrorist bad guy (pardon my simple language) who sends four terrorist strike teams to the U.S. on a mission to wreck havoc in basically small towns across the country, proving that all Americans are at risk of being attacked, not just those living or working in the major cities.
Okay, I can buy that reasoning. We saw something like that in the Oklahoma City bombing back in 1995. One could even look at the premature detonation of the University of Oklahoma’s bomb in 2005 as possibly being terrorist related, too. There’s no reason to not believe that fictitious terrorists in a Clancy novel would also want to strike at the same heartland and cause massive amounts of panic.
So the terrorists are smuggled into Mexico, and from there they work with human smugglers to secretly cross the border through the desert, a journey that the Middle Eastern characters found to be quite easy. From there, the leader of the groups manages to rent cars at a local car rental agency, and at that point the teams split up and head for their respective targets.
And just what do the terrorists target? Shopping malls. Again, this is a legitimate plan and would certainly cause a lot of panic and anger in real life.
The problem here is that it seems like the terrorists get sloppy with their work.
First of all, the attacks were not timed to be simultaneously carried out. Why would they have an attack going on in Virginia and then be surprised when, an hour or two later, the cops were more prepared in Colorado Springs and in Utah when those attacks take place?
That’s just stupid.
Second, the terrorists should have been a little bit smarter and more prepared for attacking in Colorado Springs (home of the U.S. Air Force Academy and NORAD — there just might be a lot of soldiers near by to stop such an attack) and Utah (handguns and concealed-carry permits are more common out there — a.k.a. armed citizens). This is a shame on Clancy for having a supposedly intelligent terrorist send his own men into targets that would see little success, especially when the terrorists were hoping for casualties in the hundreds. I’m sorry, but four guys with short-range assault rifles aren’t going to be very successful when attacking a shopping mall with armed citizens who most likely knew how to shoot better than the terrorists themselves.
Again, this was stupid.
And finally, why didn’t the terrorists plan such an attack for when the shopping malls were going to be packed, instead of during an average day?
Stupid!
I’m sorry, but the terrorist attacks in the novel were nothing compared to what real terrorists could do in just such of an occasion, and I’m just scratching the surface here. Clancy knows that, too, but in his book he took the easy route and dumbed down the readers in the process.
The attacks on the shopping malls were the only acts of terrorism in the story. There were no follow up attacks striking a rattled country, nor were there any accounts of the people themselves being frightened to go to malls or other such areas. So much for terrorizing a country.
The second half of the novel is the quick and easy hunting and killing of the few remaining terrorists overseas in Europe. And just who are the main stars? Jack Ryan Junior and his two twin cousins, Dominic and Brian Caruso.In essence, the super secret strike team (Ryan handling some of the intelligence work with ease, the brothers doing the contract killing) is all relative. Great.
Have we reached the point where Clancy cannot come up with a better storyline rather than having the entire extended family getting in on the action? Besides, wasn’t it enough of a security risk sending the recent president’s son overseas on assignment and letting him stay not only on the same floor, but a couple of doors down from the main terrorist leader? Hello? Anybody? Anybody?
I’ll give Clancy credit for the cool weapon that the twins get to use against their targets, but the process that it takes to acquire and kill the targets is extremely simple (at least for us readers). It’s the boring they-don’t-know-it-but-we-can-read-their-email trick, and wow, does that work so well. Line ’em up and knock ’em down. The rookies went out there and easily killed the terrorists, saving the U.S.A. from future attacks. Hooray!
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At 480 pages, this novel feels vastly incomplete, which is a strange thing to say about one of Clancy’s novels. In a way, this was Rainbow Six-lite, with the former being a vastly superior and significantly more entertaining read. John Clark and Ding Chavez would eat these 20-something young punks for lunch.
The book itself was an easy read. I haven’t read Executive Orders or The Bear and the Dragon yet, but reading this story ahead of those two didn’t really cause a problem. There were references to a couple of events, but nothing really shattering or spoiling. I’ll take on those epic novels at some point. It’s just disappointing that The Teeth of the Tiger was about as intense as the claws of a common house cat. This book had so much more potential from somebody like Tom Clancy, but I fear that his days of authoring stories may be coming to an end. The critics for Red Rabbit, another semi-recent novel written by Clancy, were just brutal.