Balance of Power is one of the Tom Clancy’s Op-Centre series. The description on the back is as follows:

Spain is a nation poised to suffer its worst internal strife in a thousand years. Certain well-place Spanish diplomats sense it. Op-Centre’s intelligence corroborates it. All the United States and Spain have to do is find a way to avert it.

Before they can, an Op-Centre representative is assassinated in Madrid on her way to a top-secret diplomatic meeting. Now all fears are confirmed. Someone very powerful wants another Spanish civil war – no matter what the cost.

I enjoy the Tom Clancy novels, whether they’re specifically written for young adults or for adults. This one is no different. It has all the elements we’ve come to expect from a Tom Clancy novel: politics; thrill; excitement and psychology. I notice from the description of the authors that Steve Pieczenik is a Harvard trained psychiatrist with a PhD in International Relations. This gives him the edge with the psychology and explains why it’s all written into the book.

One thing I thought about with this novel (and I’m sure it’s taught in writing classes, one day I’ll take one of these classes and learn stuff proper like) was how an author has to put in more than just the story line in order to have a good book. They have to put in motivation and stuff to describe their characters and background stuff like.

Our lead character is Paul Hood, he heads Op-Centre, the National Crisis Management Centre which deals with both international and domestic crises. Hood is currently caught between two worlds, he’s very good at his job but this calls him away from home a lot and his wife is trying to keep him home more often so he can be part of the family, it’s a problem many people can identify with. One of the things that makes this book good is how Clancy and Pieczenik examine this from both sides, we see Hood and wife discussing it on the phone getting more and more angry with each other, then we see each of them thinking about it and understanding the situation more.

There are more examples of this throughout the book with different scenarios and different people. Another Op-Centre representative was present at the assassination, her feelings are examined at the time and then later on, we’re given a good understanding of how she’s coping with the whole scenario. If the book was just a straight line from the assassination to the conclusion then it’d be fairly boring, but with all these little asides fleshing out the characters and the situations, making us understand how people work things change dramatically and the book comes alive.