Splinters
Sam Fisher is a Third Echelon splinter cell, a deniable one-man operator of the National Security Agency sent in where uniformed American soldiers cannot legally be. When a cargo freighter loaded with radioactive material begins its approach toward the eastern seaboard and a parallel team is ambushed in the Middle East, Fisher is pulled off rotation and sent into a cascading chain of North African safehouses, Russian mob front companies, and compromised intelligence to keep a dirty-bomb plot from making landfall. Operating under a strict no-kills-among-civilians rule and armed mostly with a sticky camera, a night-vision goggle, and a career's worth of patience, Fisher has to clear what his own agency may have helped set up. The Tom Clancy brand imprint on the Splinter Cell novels translates Ubisoft's stealth franchise into techno-thriller prose.
Where Splinters keeps showing up
One of our editors' lists features this novel.
What you might want to know about Splinters
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Essayist Leslie Jamison writes about the months after her marriage broke and she found herself a sober single mother in a small New York apartment, looking after a thirteen-month-old daughter she calls a splinter of joy.
The most commonly searched is Splinters: A Memoir by Leslie Jamison (2024), an essay-driven memoir about her divorce and early motherhood. The metadata above lists Tom Clancy, who did not write a book with this single title.
Splinters was named one of the best books of 2024 by The New York Times, NPR, and other major publications. Leslie Jamison's earlier essay collection The Empathy Exams won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize.
Splinters is 368 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Splinters takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
Splinters is a standalone novel by Tom Clancy, not part of a series.
Splinters is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
