The Hunt for Red October

This is by Tom Clancy, and it wasn't as good as Without Remorse. Supposedly it's in the same series, but the character from the other book wasn't mentioned at all in this one. And I don't remember ever meeting Jack Ryan in the other book. Maybe. There wasn't a lot of character development, that's the main reason I didn't enjoy it so much. I think there were just too many characters for that size of book. It could quite easily have been much bigger, and I think that would've made it better. However, it was Tom Clancy's first novel, and publishers don't really like to take huge novels as a debut work because there's no guarantee of how well it's going to sell. It was still a very good book, worth reading. Had an interesting plot. The Red October is a Soviet submarine, and the captain of it, along with several senior officers, have decided to defect to America... taking the Red October with them as a gift to the Americans. So begins a hunt for the Red October, carried out on the one side by the Russians who want him (apparantly Soviet ships were often referred to with a male pronoun, whereas European/US ones are usually referred to in the female, though I don't know if it's true. Suspect, given the realism of the book, that it is) back, and the Americans who want to find him and help him get home. Couple of nice twists and stuff, but I certainly preferred Without Remorse.