1989's top-selling book: Clancy ropes me back in

I've written before that I've purposefully selected either the best selling book or the Pulitzer Prize winner based on authors since I want to spread the wealth and not read too much by the same person. Well, after reading The Cardinal of the Kremlin, I decided to keep going with a Tom Clancy book to get into a story that I knew, having seen the movie, and also to check if it felt as dated as Kremlin.

Largely, the answer is no. Obviously, there are trappings in the story about the late 80s like the war on drugs and the type of "other-worldness" regarding Columbia that fed movies like Romancing the Stone, but the story is much more human than that of Kremlin and that goes a long way to making it readable (or adaptable) to any time. It's also less focused on the United States versus someone else, and more about the battles within the government itself, and that's a tale that can be told against any backdrop, too.

The opening storyline of a grisly discovery aboard a private yacht and a subsequent trial-at-sea were specifically fascinating, and though I still won't spoil a nearly forty-year-old book if I don't have to, the fact that things ended up being not quite as they were presented was actually something of a disappointment, reminding me of Tolkien relating that he was upset by the reveal in Macbeth that the moving forest was soldiers in disguise (I guess I have no qualms about spoiling Shakespeare). I feel like there's a whole book or movie to be done about Wegener and his actions.

The rest of the tale moved along briskly and kept me hooked, but I'll admit a lost a little steam after an opening that was almost too good for the rest of the book.