Book Review: Cold War by Jerome Preisler

Cold War by Jerome Preisler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The cold barrenness of Antarctica is about to become a battleground as an international uranium consortium aims to take out UpLink’s research base to hide their illegal activities. Cold War is the fifth book of Tom Clancy’s Power Plays series written by Jerome Preisler as UpLink security chief Peter Nimec journeys to Antarctica when a prototype Mars probe and recovery team goes missing only to find himself battling mercenaries employed by consortium with tentacles stretching to such places around the world like Scotland and Switzerland.

Three personnel from UpLink’s Antarctic base, Cold Corners, are attacked by an unknown group while searching for a missing Mars rover prototype, prompting Roger Gordian to Peter Nimec to the base to find the missing people. Having to quickly get use to the living conditions, Nimec deals with a storm that also contains a group do mercenaries that attack the water usage plant making Nimec want to strike back and find their missing people. A huge solar flare storm interferes with communications with both the Sword assault team and the mercenaries, but Nimec’s team was able to overpower the mercenaries. In Scotland, a series of accidents, murders, and suicides gets the attention of a detective that gets a tip from UpLink security after following a hacker and finding suspicious emails about a hit on one of the dead individual’s from the head of the UK’s nuclear authority. In Switzerland, Gabriel Morgan the head of the consortium whose mercenaries attacked UpLink is looking to take out Cold Corners, get rid of his UK partner for her mishandling of the events in Scotland, and arranging to buy Picassos the world didn’t know exist after verification from his favorite forger.

All three subplots are interesting and slowly threads connect each one of them making this a very intriguing book until suddenly it was over, all three plots cut short. Of the three subplots, the Scottish plot was the best even though it ended abruptly (not counting the tacked-on Epilogue) and frankly due to how it was cut short the Morgan subplot was worthless. Given that the previous installment was over 100 pages longer, this book was too short and really hurt the overall product of the book that was shaping up to be a great page turner.

Cold War is probably the most disappointing book in the series so far, Jerome Preisler’s creation and set up of all three subplots were great and as they slowly twisted together the book was hard to put down then suddenly it ended with a thud and empty feeling. While this book isn’t the worst in the series, it was a major letdown given how it started off.

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