Executive Power Tom Clancy Review
Spy Book Review by Matthew Kresal for Spybrary.com
This Executive Power Tom Clancy review examines how Andrews & Wilson deliver one of the strongest continuation novels in the Ryanverse.
In Executive Power, Andrews & Wilson deliver one of the strongest Clancy continuation novels to date, blending espionage, military tension, and political intrigue while expanding the Ryan family’s next generation.
Mention the word “technothriller” and there’s a good chance that Tom Clancy’s name comes to mind. The man who introduced millions of readers to CIA analyst turned unlikely President of the United States Jack Ryan wrote or co-wrote over a dozen thrillers featuring the character before his passing in 2013.
Since then, a number of writers have supplied readers with Clancy’s signature mix of the intelligence world, military hardware, and insight into real-world political hot spots. The latest authors to carry on the elder Ryan’s story are Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson, with their third Ryan novel out this month in the form of Executive Power.
Like Act of Defiance before it, it showcases Andrews & Wilson’s skills as both authors in their own right and as heirs to Clancy’s mantle
Matthew Kresal
Andrews & Wilson’s novel is notionally “a Jack Ryan novel,” per the cover. Jack, still occupying the Oval Office, very much features in the book with scenes putting him once more in the Oval Office and the Situation Room as a crisis unfolds. One that has an added complication when the youngest Ryan son, Kyle, ends up becoming involved through his work as a self-described “cyber weenie” for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in Angola. It’s a testament to Andrews & Wilson that, even after more than twenty novels featuring Ryan, they’re able to find a new depth to explore with the character here even as he remains in the White House having to watch events unfold and make decisions away from the main action.
As all of that suggests, the real focus of Executive Power is on the younger Ryans. Specifically the two youngest children, now grown up and serving their country as their father before them. One of them is Katie, an intelligence analyst and lieutenant commander in the US Navy, whom the pair brought to the fore in 2024’s Act of Defiance.
As was the case with Andrews & Wilson’s other Clancy titles, it’s hard not to see a lot of the younger Jack Ryan in Katie as a bright and insightful person consequentially thrust into a dire situation. In this case leading her to play a pivotal role in the novel’s events as she gets drawn into the crisis. The pair also work on building Katie’s life outside of the Navy and intelligence, briefly reuniting her with her elder sister Sally (who followed her mom into the medical profession) and looking at her budding romantic relationship. It’s nice to see the ongoing development and also see how Katie handles the personal dimension that the novel’s events bring forth.
The real stay of Executive Power is Kyle. If Katie is a chip off the old block, Kyle is a very different character. Quiet and reserved, a “cyber weenie” who left a promising naval career behind to work at the DIA without informing his family, there is an unassuming quality to him that comes across. Beneath that reserve, however, is a fit runner and thoughtful young man thrust into a dangerous situation in the novel’s opening pages that doesn’t let up until the closing chapter. Kyle becomes the reader’s eyes and ears on the ground as events in Angola begin to spin out of control, getting into a fair share of scrapes but not in an overly action hero mode or being unbelievable given his background. Nor is the reserve inhuman or infallible, something that the glimpses at his internal monologue or interactions with embassy member Madison Bennett highlights. Like his siblings, Kyle brings something new to the Ryanverse and is a welcomed addition to it that hopefully fellow authors will continue to expand upon.
Beyond the characters, Andrews & Wilson craft a tale very much in the Clancy tradition. What starts off initially as a simple hit upon a DIA team begins a snowball of events that explodes into a full-blown crisis involving the siege of the US embassy in the Angolan capital city of Luanda with hostages taken, a coup against its elected government, and the possibility of a superpower conflict as the US and China risk being drawn into events. Events that involve the Ryan family, of course, from the streets of Luanda to a Marine amphibious force off the coast and into the White House. Like Clancy’s best works, Executive Power exists at the intersection of espionage, military action, and political intrigue.
Whether it’s to your taste or not will depend, therefore, on how you feel about the kind of writing Clancy and his continuation authors offer. Moving beyond the opening chapter, Andrews & Wilson take their time setting the plot in motion across much of the novel’s first 130 pages or so. From there, the pace picks up and by the last 100 pages or so it becomes a headlong rush of suspense and action. There’s plenty of military hardware and acronyms being used, the latter sometimes dizzily so even as a longtime Clancy and technothriller reader. Thankfully there’s a handy glossary at the front to explain the terms, something that only occasionally slows down the action when the reader has forgotten what the likes of JLTV stands for (“Joint Landing Tactical Vehicle” as it happens).
If you’re a fan of the genre, however, that might well be part and parcel of the experience, but along with a couple of overly cinematic moments (including an attempt at a literary needle drop moment during a special forces firefight early on), it does take away from an otherwise solid narrative.
Even so, Executive Power ranks among the strongest of the Clancy continuation novels. Like Act of Defiance before it, it showcases Andrews & Wilson’s skills as both authors in their own right and as heirs to Clancy’s mantle. Sadly, Executive Power is set to be the duo’s final Ryan novel with a new author set to follow in 2026. They depart both with a strong swansong and with having set a high standard in their wake. Something that is by no means a bad thing.
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