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Fiction. Suspense. Thriller. HTML: The year is 2001, and American businessman Roger Gordian has extended his reach into space. His company has become the principal contractor in the design and manufacture of Orion, a multinational space station. But the launch of a shuttle carrying parts for the station is sabotaged. Mysterious guerrilla attacks occur at the manufacturing facilities in Brazil and Kazakhstan. And Gordian's deepest fears are confirmed... The Orion project has been targeted by an international terrorist whose criminal enterprises thrive on violence and political instability. Harlan De Vane's goal is to cripple Gordian's intelligence and security tean, while stowing a high-powered electromagnetic pulse generator aboard Orion�??a state-of-the-art weapon with the capacity to throw every major American city into chaos...… (more)
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The Space Shuttle Orion catches fire and explodes on the launch pad killing its commander as Roger Gordian is an eyewitness as UpLink is the major contractor of the ISS that Orion was to begin construction. Several days later a mercenary force attacks an UpLink run ISS related facility in Brazil, which makes the next ISS-related launch by the Russians seem like the next target. Which is what Harlan DeVane and his mercenary leader want not only UpLink but the Russians to believe as well. But DeVane wants the “attack” to be a diversion so that his mercenary chief can plant a device on the ISS component to turn it into a weapon he can attack and blackmail governments with, however UpLink’s new Sword operative sniffs out the plan and prevents the device from being installed though the mercenary agent escapes. But DeVane gives UpLink its due but moves on to the next project.
Unlike the two previous books in the series, this one is pure setup for the future installments because it introduced several significant characters though at the expense of a focused story that all the plotlines easily connected with one another. The book bounces all over the place from Cape Canaveral to Brazil to San Jose to Maine to Bolivia to Albania to Kazakhstan with a specific plotline (or several) in each location that related to the main plot but honestly some could have been scrapped. Preisler dedicated an entire chapter to a Brazilian train disaster caused by a smaller version of the device that DeVane planned to install on the ISS component, but it was separated into about five different points-of-view that just made it weird and essentially seem like filler. The feel of the entire book was just setting things up for future books.
While Shadow Watch isn’t necessarily a good book, it’s alright and frankly meant to introduce many characters that will prove pivotal to future installments of the series. Once again dealing with creating a story around a computer game, Preisler did a passable job but not as good as either of the two previous books in the Power Plays series.