Books in Brief: Patriot Games

Patriot Games, by Tom Clancy (Putnam’s, 540 pp., $19.95)

Tom Clancy’s earlier best-selling action novels, The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising, dealt with Soviet-American confrontations. This time he has taken on international terrorism, specifically a left-wing splinter group of the Provisional IRA whose attempted kidnapping of members of the royal family in London is heroically foiled by a visiting Irish American ex-Marine who teaches at Annapolis and freelances for the CIA.