Tom Clancy's Op-Center: Games of State by work-for-hire *

Games of State (Tom Clancy's Op-Center, Book 3) is a 200 page, author-less thriller packed into 500 pages. In this comic story, the bad guy is the cliched reclusive, megalomaniac billionaire planning to take over the world ... with the aid of video games and neo-nazies.

The good guys are special forces types, aided by an assortment of heroes, including a man in a wheel chair aided by a female cinema intern, who together defeat a crowd of heavily armed bad guys. Into this mix is added a mixture of old girlfriends and murders for what passes for character development and motivation.

Without spoiling this comic book plot or the 68 boring cliff hangers, the good guys win.

All of this might be tolerable, if not for the dearth of action. Most of the book is silly discussions of politics, paranoid and conspiracy pontification, and characters tell other characters, at length, information known to the both characters and the reader.

...tell me again why I'm going to France.

If you decide the waste your time on this stuff, feel free to skip every other paragraph and every third page. You will, however, get a good laugh at the pre-Google Internet using FTP and modems and other silly technology like the T-rays that read documents on the other side of 6" stone walls.