Patriot Games

Patriot Games is a thriller by the American writer Tom Clancy, published on 2 July 1987. It is a prequel to The Hunt for Red October, and chronologically the first of the books in which Jack Ryan appears.

Ryan is a history professor and a former United States Marine. He is in London with his wife and daughter when it happens, and the attempt to kidnap the Prince and Princess of Wales and their infant son takes place on the Mall in London. It is organised by the Ulster Liberation Army, a splinter group of the Provisional Irish Republican Army.

Ryan intervenes. He incapacitates one of the attackers, a man named Sean Miller, and by doing so he puts himself in the way of the group and becomes a target. The novel follows what that costs him, and it brings his family into the same danger.

The book was a bestseller of that year, and it was the second of the novels about Ryan to be published. A film adaptation with Harrison Ford as Ryan was released on 5 June 1992.