DARK WINTER

Responding to a U.S. military computer-system failure, an elite group of American operatives must prevent pending nuclear strikes.

Retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Tata (Direct Fire, 2017, etc.) brings back Jake Mahegan for another realistic, high-stakes military adventure. As Jake is embracing a growing romantic connection with his love interest and fellow highly skilled operator, Cassie, a new threat emerges on the horizon. This threat comes in the form of Ian Gorham, president and CEO of Manaslu, a cutting-edge company named after "the treacherous Nepalese summit that few dared to climb"; Manaslu's “search engine was faster than Google, the social media connections had surpassed Facebook, and the retail endeavor had rapidly overtaken Amazon.” Now that he's beaten all the other tech companies, Gorham has turned his attention to a bigger project: remaking the world into a "global...unified" society. But first, he'll have to "burn the world to the ground, so that he could rebuild it." Using financing and resources from his company, Gorham has created an advanced defense laboratory and a private security force. With this infrastructure in place, he initiates the finely tuned ComWar, or Computer Optimized Warfare, by hacking into the central control systems of Russia, Iran, and North Korea. ComWar starts by shutting down power grids and closing Wi-Fi hot spots and leads to artillery strikes and artificial intelligence attacks, among other atrocities. While some of the details of this plot are a little vague, the general direction of the narrative is believable, and the main characters, while lacking development, get into copious amounts of action.

A very readable and contemporary military action story.