From their first encounter as teenagers in high school, Scott and Sid seem unlikely friends. Scott is a shambolic dreamer, intent on carving out his own path in life and holding up a metaphorical middle finger to anyone who tries to stop him. He is a quintessential troubled teen: on his fifth high school by the age of fifteen, alienated from his peers, crippled by recurring nightmares and disliked by his own foster parents. Sid, on the other hand, wants nothing more than to be liked. An...

After the terrorist attacks on 9/11, Jack Ryan, studying at the London School of Economics, becomes a U.S. Marine fighting in Afghanistan, where his spine is critically injured when his helicopter is shot down. During the recovery, he meets Cathy Muller, the medical student helping him learn to walk again, and Thomas Harper, an official with the C.I.A. who recruits him. Ten years later, Ryan is working on Wall Street covertly for the C.I.A., looking for suspect financial transactions that would...