Tom Clancy has started this series - Net Force - but it has deteriorated into a series of incoherent books that do not show anything similar to what Mr. Clancy offered in the golden era of his career. I believe most books after the initial one were written by others. This one is about a lot of separate stories, but mostly about unknown hackers entering into highly protected military Virtual Reality software and crashing them. The Net Force goes after them. At the same time several threads are unfolding, a bit similar to what Clancy did in his Jack Ryan books. However Clancy managed to bring all the complex threads in his books to an exciting climax and all stories converged into the main one very skilfully. None of that here. You hear lots of separate stories and the result is.... mediocrity.
Okay, I'm giving this a four, but I happened to notice that it's got a 1 on Amazon. This book is probably best read if you've read the whole series, and have room for a lot of the soap opera aspects of the story. It finally catches up to modern times, more or less, with a scenario that includes Chinese hackers, and the effect that has on the US-Chinese relationship (only mildly discussed, but there). I liked it as much as I liked the others, but I definitely get the sense I'm in the minority. And in keeping with the sense that the series is changing, Net Force is taken over by the DOD and belongs to the Marines. Interesting turn, and it certainly makes one wonder what's coming next!
