Red Storm Rising
The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, The Cardinal of the Kremlin, Clear and Present Danger
The Jack Ryan novels jumped the shark beginning with The Sum of All Fears, altho the John Clark prequel, Without Remorse, is reasonably good.
Other than the six titles above, I recommend you stay away from them unless you liked the Roger Moore era of Bond films as the plots of the later novels are about as believable as the Roger Moore Bond films, but the characters not as witty.
Clancy in an excellent example of an author who suffered from becoming a franchise.
Pretty much this. Although the franchising did end up creating a lot of other good stuff like the Tom Clancy video games released in the late 90s and early 2000s.
But yeah the longer his novels went on (post-
Clear and Present Danger) the more they evolved into a political polemic. If you're a conservative/Republican you might enjoy it more but I found it grating.
I consider a lot of his earlier work to be better than his later work. The newer stuff is ghostwritten and doesn't really compare.
