Jerome Preisler

Precious stones, secret technology, and black-market deals plus New York City makes for an interesting combination that slowly finds UpLink getting involved via an unexpected source. Zero Hour is the seventh book of Tom Clancy’s Power Plays series written by Jerome Preisler who brings together secondary characters from previous books to join the main cast.

Patrick Sullivan leaves his mistress’ apartment to meet his buyer of artificially created sapphires as well as plans for a laser gun show more codenamed Dragonfly but is killed by his buyer and becomes a missing person. Sullivan’s employer, a Pakistani national who doesn’t know Sullivan stole the plan, is planning to use the laser gun for a massive terrorist attack by releasing a deadly acid vapor cloud over New York City as well as sell the other prototype to Muslim freedom fighters in Kashmir. Sullivan’s wife goes to an UpLink employee who was his last meeting and asked for Sword’s help—thanks to newspaper reporting on UpLink’s help to find the Russian conspirators who attacked Time’s Square—to find her husband. The employee goes around the local Sword leader to Roger Gordian to ask for the favor forcing the new UpLink CEO to send Tom Ricci to New York to investigate the matter. Ricci and the local Sword leader discuss her investigation into Sullivan’s employer on what to do with the Sullivan matter then Ricci goes to upstate New York to spy on Sullivan’s employer and sees men packing things into a U-Haul that he tails to a nearby motel and has a local Sword operative observe it while learning where it was rented. Unfortunately, one of the terrorists make the lookout and arrange an escape, but Ricci meets with Sullivan’s murderer and learns about the Dragonfly that he connects with where the U-Haul was rented. Ricci leads a Sword team that intercepts that van just before the laser gun was powered up.

Honestly the above synopsis is leaving out two subplots that at the end of the book amounted to just taking up space even though one was entertaining and had potential to add to the overall story but fizzled to nothing. Upon ending this book it wasn’t hard to rate this the worst book of the Power Plays series as nothing really came together and Preisler focused on characters who in the end amounted to nothing in the overall scheme of things while a character study on Ricci was underwhelming. And as one of the shortest books in the series it really tells and exposes one of the biggest weaknesses of Preisler’s writing.

Zero Hour is short and devoid of coherence in the various narrative threads while focusing on characters that in the end did not having anything to do with the endgame. Jerome Preisler has written some good installments of this series, but all the things he’s done wrong in the so-so installments were on display making for a disappointing book. show less

The new millennium started with a new kind of terrorism and now a new kind of security threat not only endangers national security but also corporations. ruthless.com, the second book in Tom Clancy’s Power Plays, written by Jerome Preisler finds Roger Gordian’s UpLink International under pressure of a hostile takeover from a longtime rival while half a world away his security team stumbles onto evidence of a union of drug dealers, corrupt politicians, and Gordian’s own rival to shock show more the world.

Marcus Caine’s Monolith Technologies is attempting a hostile takeover of Roger Gordian’s UpLink International thanks to a secret friendship with a longtime Wall Street expert undermining UpLink on television and newsprint while battling Gordian on encryption deregulation in the media and Congress. Half a world away in Singapore, Gordian’s employee Max Blackburn goes to met his girlfriend who works for Monolith’s Singapore division and who he convinced to spy on her employer, finding evidence of Caine’s illegal activities. However, Caine and his East Asian associates found out and attempt to kidnap both her and Max but only succeed in getting Max which leads to his death. The disappearance of Max gets his boss Peter Nimec anxious who has to tell Gordian, who doesn’t condone industrial spying, before heading to Singapore to find out what happen. Nimec saves Max’s girlfriend from the thugs looking for her and gets the information she stole while Gordian upsets Caine’s takeover bid after surviving a contract killing. Meanwhile UpLink security apprehends two mafia members attempting to steal encryption keycodes for a US nuclear submarine from a key-bank facility, which gets the Malay military to back up a similar facility from attack by rogue Indonesian military forces looking for codes for the same US nuclear submarine that has the US President and other regional leaders on it. In the aftermath of the failed terrorist attack, Caine has a mafia gunman kill him while Nimec gets revenge for Max on the man who killed him.

While ruthless.com is based on a computer game like Politika, the story elements Preisler was given to work with resulted in a better-quality story in narrative flow and how the various subplots interlinked with one another. The decision by Preisler to nix the Gordian separation/divorce subplot from the previous book was a massive improvement allowing the businessman and technologically thinking Gordian to come out more while the attempt on his life also allowed the reader to get a better insight into how he thinks. Another strong point was Preisler’s giving the various antagonists some buildup early to give them gravitas, which means when the protagonists go up against them later in the story there’s importance to the confrontation in whichever way it happens. The only downside was that Peter Nimec comes in relatively late in the book, especially if memory serves, he becomes the main action guy as the series progresses.

ruthless.com is a solid follow up installment in the Power Plays series that improves where the first book faltered. Jerome Preisler writes a nice mixture of business intrigue and international terrorism plotting that keeps you looking forward to seeing what happens. show less

In the already bloody and terror stricken 21st Century, another nightmare of biological warfare is looming thanks to Harlan DeVane who wants to show off his new “product” be getting revenge on UpLink International’s CEO Roger Gordian. Bio-Strike the fourth book in Tom Clancy’s Power Plays series written by Jerome Preisler sees UpLink’s top brass and Sword security force at first figure out what is wrong with their boss then who did it and finally how to cure it all with time slowly show more whittling down.

Using a genetically modified hantavirus, Harlan DeVane plays to sell the bioweapon to both sides of various conflicts across the globe but wants to take out Roger Gordian for his own pleasure due to the failure of his space terror plan several months before because of UpLink’s Sword security. The Sword operative that was the unknown mole in the previous book is forced to administer the activating viral agent that sends Gordian into intensive care and doctors scrambling to find the cause, while UpLink’s Sword leadership begins their own investigation which eventually leads to the mole who directs them to his boss a southern California drug lord in league with DeVane but suddenly finding himself in escalating situation with a cross border rival. The two drug lords have a meeting where one is killed sooner than his rival wanted, but he then dies via car bomb planted by the free agent informant who set the two drug lords up against one another. The informant then hands over a copy of a conversation between the mole and the drug lord talking about the viral activator to a Sword operative who was scouting the drug lord meet up. Based on the conversation, the Sword team is able to track down DeVane’s lab in Canada and strike at it while getting the medical samples to nullify the bioweapon and save Gordian’s life from the virus. Out tens of millions of dollars and having pissed off his clients, DeVane isn’t a happy man.

Overall the book is good, however in the overall series the story in this book appeared too soon especially after how Shadow Watch ended. DeVane went with being fine with being stopped to wanting to kill Roger Gordian in a span of months, which given that the DeVane arc will continue for several more books it seemed like a big escalation since it’ll calm down over the next few books. One of the annoying things in the book was that the President-elect of Bolivia was assassinated via the virus, but later in the book he was from Brazil and later Peru so a big editor failure. Yet despite issues I talked about earlier in this paragraph, this is probably the best book of the series as the primary plot and the various subplots were well connected resulting in very good quick read that results in time well spent.

Bio-Strike is potentially the best book of the Power Plays series, even though Jerome Preisler had DeVane’s grudge against Gordian go from 1 to 10 just like that was a weird decision it didn’t undermine the overall story. After the let down of the previous installment of the series, this book really picks things up and makes you interested where the series will go from here. show less

I remember the loss of the Thresher and the Scorpion. And I remember that the Navy said both sank accidentally. The author of this book says the USSR baited the Scorpion into a kill box and torpedoed it. And that could be so. My quibble is that this book is written in such a way that the casual reader will think it's the official word, not one writer's opinion.