Tom Clancy has done it again. Op-Center: Sting of the Wasp has enough action to keep you glued to your seat until the very end. What a great story-line and cast of characters.

"Tom Clancy's Op-Center: Sting of the Wasp" eBook was published in 2019 and was written by Jeff Rovin, Steve Pieczenik (contributor), and Tom Clancy (listed as contributor though Mr. Clancy died in 2013). Mr. Rovin has published more than 100 novels. This is the 18th Op-Center novel.

I categorize this novel as ‘R’ because it contains scenes of Violence. The story is set in contemporary times. The primary character is former Op-Center director Chase Williams.

A terrorist attack has taken place in New York City abort the Museum Ship Intrepid. The attack has been carried out by Iranian Captain Ahmed Salehi. Williams is relieved of command of Op-Center and it is dismantled.

Known to only a few, Williams is put in charge of an ultra-secret group known as BLACK WASP. The WASPs are an odd collection - US Navy martial arts expert Lieutenant Grace Lee, marksman extraordinaire Lance Corporal Jaz Rivette, and JAG attorney and criminologist Major Hamilton Breen. This very unorthodox team is loosely led by Williams on the trail of Salehi.

I enjoyed the 8.5+ hours I spent reading this 348-page action thriller. I have read many of Clancy’s novels as well as several of the Op-Center novels. While this was not the best, it was an enjoyable read. It was very clearly not written by Clancy. The action was pretty constant in the book. As with so many thrillers, the sequence of events, luck and opportunity fell in line so that the ‘heroes’ prevailed. I like the selected cover art. I give this novel a 3.9 (rounded up to a 4) out of 5.

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Tom Clancy's Op-Center has always been a favorite of mine, however this one missed the mark for me. I am not sure what it was about it, I just could not really get into the story or the characters as much as before. I hope the next book is a better fit for me.

Jeff Rovin had what seemed an impossible task in carrying on the Tom Clancy tradition. BUT, he's scored 100 on this one. I read Tom Clancy books because I could count on a story that would pull me in and keep the action going from start to finish. Op-Center is that kind of book. As a highly classified team is built to counter the worst terrorists in history, the selected characters come to life. Ready to fight and win by whatever means necessary, their characters and back story were carefully developed to carry on the jack Ryan traditions. This was a fantastic book.

This review is not going to be long. I am not a huge fan of a review rehashing the entire plot and spoiling it for everyone.

This is the first book by Jeff Rovin that I have read. I thoroughly enjoyed it. His style of writing reminds me of Clancy, it keeps you interested and waiting for more. I cannot wait to read more of his books.

I received an ARC of this book to read through NetGalley in exchange for a fair review.

I may be biased, I've yet to read a Clancy book I dislike. Between the excellent story line, vivid detail and obvious research every book becomes its own world.

I have been a Tom Clancy fan since forever. His character Jack Ryan, now a heart-pounding show on Amazon Prime, is probably one of my top five action characters of all time. His latest book, ‘Op-Center Sting of the Wasp’ came out on May 28th and it was a featured book on my May TBR list.

Despite the mixed reviews on Amazon, some readers are pointing out that the book plot is not plausible or the characters are not on par with other Clancy books, I simply and whole-heartedly disagree. The Sting Of The Wasp is packed with action. The characters deal with issues that are modern, timely and wait for it plausible.

A quick synopsis: USS Intrepid becomes a terrorist site when a bomb explodes on the flight desk, killing innocent people who were there to view the floating Air and Space Museum. The culprit behind this horrendous act is Captan Ahmed Salehi, an Iranian with a deep seethed hate against America.

In Washington, The White House has ordered the Op-Center disbanded, but a new team, called Black Wasp, I love the name, is formed. Each member is chosen for his unique talent. We are introduced to an intelligence agent, a lawyer, a martial arts expert, and a sharpshooter.

By far my favorite was the intelligence officer.

My only complaint is that I wish a female character was included in the Black Wasp.

If you are a Tom Clancy fan, ‘Op-Center Sting of the Wasp’ is exactly what you will expect. And I think you will like the book. It’s visually descriptive to help you follow the action, there is plenty of that going on.

The Op Center series usually packs a punch, and Sting of the Wasp delivers. It's an enjoyable action thriller with a heavy dosage of action. I appreciate that Jeff Rovin balances out the action with interesting characters. Sting of the Wasp is the kind of book I look for when seeking a quick vacation or weekend read. It's a well woven story and it introduces a team of new characters that promise interesting stories in the series.
I received my copy through NetGalley under no obligation.

As a Tom Clancy fan, I was really hoping that Jeff Rovin could continue, with his writing, my love of espionage and an action packed story to “ get the bad guys”. Rovin did not disappoint, although I found I had to work hard to keep my interest at times. It was sometimes too technical for my liking. It will be fun to see how Rovin develops the main characters in his next novel. Thanks to Netgalley and St Martin’s Grifffin for letting me read the arc .

Published by St. Martin's Griffin on May 28, 2019

Jeff Rovin is a flake with a questionable sense of reality, but so was Tom Clancy. I try not to hold flakiness against writers who produce good stories, including Clancy, who wrote some very good novels before he succumbed to right wing rabies. I got the strong sense in reading Sting of the Wasp that Rovin wanted to throw red meat to the rabid right while balancing the novel with more moderate characters. There isn’t much balance here, but the real test of a thriller is whether it thrills. As is true of Rovin’s other contributions to the Tom Clancy Op-Center series (zero of which were written by Tom Clancy), Rovin proves himself to be a capable storyteller without offering anything that thriller fans haven’t seen before.

Sting of the Wasp might be seen as prescient in its depiction of a president who is considering a missile strike against Iran. Apparently, John Bolton is dictating policy in the fictional White House, even if the fictional president is considerably more focused than Donald Trump. Only January Dow, in charge of intelligence at the State Department, acts as a voice of reason, and she is far from being a reasonable person.

The missile strike is contemplated as a response to a chemical attack at a military tourist center that begins the novel. The attack is carried out by Ahmed Salehi. Salehi was on the Center’s radar, but Salehi’s strike was neither anticipated nor preempted. That costs Chase Williams his job and puts an end to the Ops-Center. But there wouldn’t be a novel if Chase retired, so he’s secretly placed in charge of capturing or killing Salehi.

Chase’s new team consists of three people. The team was created to be mobile and agile, with the ability to respond to threats in “real time.” Its mode of operation is to charge into battle without a plan, which is touted as the new model for warfare. Unfortunately, the bad guys seem capable of planning, so charging after them willy-nilly might not be the most intelligent approach to military intelligence.

Chase’s “Black Wasp” team include a JAG professor called Major Breen, who supposedly represents the “conscience” of the team because he believes in due process rather than assassination; a Marine sharpshooter named Rivet, who believes in shooting people; and a psychopath named Grace who is a combat instructor with special operations command. “Black Wasp” stands for Black-ops Wartime Accelerated Strike Placement, an awkward name created to justify a cool acronym. Black Wasp is “liberated from the burden of morality” — morality being a quaint notion that right wingers quickly abandon when its strictures prove to be inconvenient.

The characters are stereotypes, liberated from the burden of complex thought and actual personalities. They see the enemy as “savages” while the Major with the alleged conscience feels no qualms about subjecting them to a bit of “discomfort” with “enhanced interrogation” (e.g., torture). Of course, Americans who torture people are not savages because, well, they’re Americans. One character seems to be upset that Americans are moved by the image of a dead child because the child is a terrorist’s granddaughter and therefore deserved to pay a heavy price for being born. The worst part of reading a novel like this is the realization that people think this way.

I was amused that characters express outrage about the treatment of women by conservative Muslims. It is evil to abuse woman regardless of one’s religious beliefs, but domestic abuse by members of the American military is both evil and rampant. I often see condemnation of violence against women in books that demonize Muslims, but those same books are inevitably silent about abusers in the American military, given that members of the military are regarded as heroic by default. That makes me think people who rail against the inequality of Muslim women in certain countries actually have a problem with Muslims, not with violence against women.

Anyway, Chase and his team chase Salehi to Trinidad and then to Yemen, making some adventurous stops along the way. Rovin always constructs a competent if simplistic plot and writes strong action scenes. He moves the story with good pace and produces entertaining pulp fiction. The novel shakes up the Ops-Center series, which was getting stale, but I’m not sure Black Wasp is any better. Sting of the Wasp balances decent action and competent prose with shallow characterization and a predictable plot.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The premise of this thriller is that the US has created an experimental "Black Wasp" team to provide rapid response to security threats without rules, oversight, military discipline, specialized training or organizational infighting. While that would clearly be a terrible idea--more suitable to a terrorist organization than a government or military--it's not uncommon in the thriller biz. It's pretty much what James Bond does.

Such a team might be suitable for a simple offensive goal, infiltrate somewhere and blow it up for example. But in this book the team is assigned the task of finding and capturing an international terrorist. This is exactly the kind of task that requires huge, coordinated teams of specialists: intelligence collectors and analysts, people trained in languages and cultures, agents who can operate in the likely locations. It can take thousands of pieces of data from different sources to locate the person, and coordinated teams to organize the capture.

If you were going to pick four people to accomplish this task, you could do a lot better than a martial arts expert, a sharpshooter, a retired desk-intelligence officer and a lawyer (not the type of lawyer invented by the television show JAG, but one whose main job is to feel bad about all the illegal things the other three team members are doing).

The retired intelligence officer is the only one with relevant skills for finding the terrorist, and he needs a big organization to supervise, you can't expect him to wander the globe on his own hoping to bump into the guy. The martial arts expert can beat people up and the sharpshooter can shoot them, but only if they can get close, which means not only finding the guy, but having the language skills and cultural knowledge to operate where he is. The hard part is locating the terrorist, and penetrating his defenses to get close to him. After that four random people should have a decent shot at being able to capture him, and only the martial arts experts has useful specific skills. Another big problem is extraction after capture, how is this team supposed to bring the guy back?

Okay, plausibility is not a big deal with thrillers, it's taut action that makes them fun. You won't find much of that here. The plot is the infinitely recycled one of a few plucky malcontent Americans exacting immediate revenge on terrorists who kill people in the US. The action scenes require tedious, cumbersome set-up, although they go off crisply enough once the shooting starts. But there's no pace or continuity, just action scenes interspersed with mostly pointless dialog and tortured introspection.

This is nothing like Tom Clancy's early thrillers which are classics of the genre. It's contrived and formulaic, written in a plodding (except for brief bursts of action) style.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The book hooked me from the opening, in typical Tom Clancy style. The USS Intrepid is the scene of a massive terrorist explosion. Captain Ahmed Salehi is the Iranian terrorist who manages to flee the scene with the backing of a wealthy Iranian who is looking to establish a new Islamic State. Chase Williams's Op-Center has been forced to disband and a new Black Wasp team has been established. Lots of cat and mouse chasing, tons of action, and suspense make this a page turner.

I recommend this book to those looking for a good actin packed thriller.

Thanks to NetGalley for an arc in exchange for an honest review.

It was good entertainment but to me this was Tom Clancy in name only . The whole after the terrorist attack director Chase Williams radically transforms the agency into a ground-breaking new mobile strike force.

Riiiiight. Come on now, we can;t even find Bin-Laden's son.

The book was good just not the realism of TC Gd rest his soul I hope.

The novel starts with a bang, literally, the USS Intrepid is docked and now a museum, until the terrorist Salehi and his accomplice board and set off a bomb.
Director Chase Williams of Op-Center was responsible for foiling a previous terrorist plot of Salehi's and Salehi is back to take revenge. The question on everyone's lips though is how did Op-centre fail to pick up his presence or plan, in their own country.
Op-Center is now the disgrace of the intelligence community and Chase has to take the fall.
Matt Berry however, the Deputy Chief of Staff, approaches him about a new task force, named Black Wasp. It's a small unit of four, each with their own skill set and only the President and Matt Berry are aware of them. Chase has the opportunity to go after Salehi and get his revenge.
The action starts as they chase him from country to country while wondering if he is indeed the mastermind behind it all. I very much enjoyed this new team and look forward to reading about them again. At one point it did seem that one of the team members was about to go off the rails but I am glad that cliche was abandoned!
Thank you to #Netgalley and #StMartin'sPress for the advanced copy of #StingoftheWasp in exchange for my honest review.

The USS Intrepid sits at anchor at a NYC harbor. A significant tourist stop. On any given day, the flight deck has scores of people wandering around. For those of a certain age, they remember the Intrepid picking up Scott Carpenter, the 4th American in space. A piece of American history.

To Captain Ahmed Salehi, the Intrepid is a target.

On a delightful spring morning, he, and a hired Iranian chemical engineer, put a figurative match to an incendiary device that spews flammable chemicals across the deck and incinerates hundreds of tourists. And in one final ‘fuck you’ to the American intelligence network, he looks directly into a surveillance camera as he leaves the ship.

It’s not like the US didn’t know about Salehi. His plan to set off a small nuke in Minneapolis was stopped and the ship under his command had been sunk. He was a known commodity. But somehow, he’d slipped under the radar. In particular, the radar of the center devoted to keeping track of people like him.

Op Center dropped the ball.

POTUS calls the heads of every 3-letter agency set up to protect the US. In the White House situation room, Op Center director Chase Williams is given a tongue lashing by every political opponent of the Center. At the end, POTUS shoves Williams out the door and the Center is ordered to be summarily disbanded. Today.

Williams’ entire team is out of a job. And he has to figure out his own future while mourning the loss of life in New York. Once he gets home, Matt Berry, an old friend and now the Deputy Chief of Staff to POTUS, contacts him to meet. Now.

With the full support of POTUS, Berry offers Chase a job. Head up a new covert team. Small. Out of the Defense Logistics Agency. Unlimited cash, supplies, support. Flexible. Forget about endless planning and getting approvals. Just go and get the job done. And this job is to get Salehi. Alive or dead. Just get him. An encrypted text is sent to three specific individuals:

“Black Wasp”

Lance Corporal Jaz Rivette. Sniper and an expert with any type of sidearm or rifle. Logged his first kill as a 10yo when he stopped a store robbery. Lt. Grace Lee. Hand to hand combat instructor at Ft Bragg. Doesn’t carry a gun. All she needs are her martial arts skills and a few knives. Commander Hamilton Breen. With the Navy JAG office. Yeah, he’s a lawyer. Sort of the team’s soul. But he is still a soldier, and a damn good one. They drop everything to meet in ASAP in DC.

They don’t know Williams. Just that he’s been assigned to lead this team. With intel from every overt and covert agency passed to them, they start tracking Salehi’s movements. The chemical engineer fled to Toronto. Salehi heads to the Caribbean via Hartford, CT. Rumors of Salehi’s whereabouts run rampant. The engineer is found murdered. Apparently by a Jamaican Muslim group. That’s what Williams grabs and Black Wasp heads for a night parachute drop into a crime-ridden corner of Jamaica.

The hunt goes through Jamaica then after a couple flight changes, arrives in Yemen where Salehi meets up with his benefactor who has promised him a ship and a lifetime of cash as a reward for striking at the Great Satan. Black Wasp just has to catch up with him before he disappears to the ocean. Black Wasp is pretty effective when it doesn’t have to check back in with Momma in DC every time a decision is necessary. It's a breathless week after the Intrepid attack.

I thought this was interesting and credible. It could happen. Whether there is something like Black Wasp buried deep within the government is open for debate. Not just on practical grounds. But moral grounds, too. The closer they get to Salehi, the more the bodies pile up. Most are bad guys, but there are what amounts to an execution or two along the way.

Way back when, I read every novel Clancy wrote (really liked Clark and Chavez characters. Wish Hollywood would make Without Remorse into a movie), but I began to tire of the plot lines when there was an attempt to pass the Jack Ryan flame on to Jack, Jr. I read the first couple Op Center books but didn’t return. While I’m not likely to go back to where I left off and work my way forward, I will say that if the Op Center series continues the Black Wasp theme along, I’ll be there. This is just the kind of book Men Reading Books was based on.

Tom Clancy has been dead for almost 4 years, but thanks to ghost writers like Steve Pieczenik ,the hits just keep on coming. Jack Ryan doesn’t show up in this one, rather, a dark ops group code named Black Wasp. The group is tasked to track down and deal with the latest international terrorist. Each member of the group possesses unique skills and they are unencumbered by conventional rules of engagement. Readers of the action adventure, anti-terrorism genre will enjoy this one.

So, I fully expected to love this because I always love Tom Clancy books. All the way back, to many years ago. However, this book was just okay for me. There were some plot points that fell flat to me.
Number one: too cookie-cutter in style and format. The only characters that attempted to venture off the norm didn't work.
Number two: The members of the elite team: Wasp special forces were not believable the way the elite teams in prior novels have felt. It seemed to be too staged as trying to capture certain styles of characters for the novel rather than what would actually work on an elite special ops team.
Number three: Why even include the JAG character? His character could have been eliminated and it would not have affected the storyline at all. He was not well developed enough maybe to explain why he was a member of the team or maybe could have been more useful a member, but not for me. Just felt out of place.
I tried to like it as much as prior Clancy books but it wasn't as good for me.

#StingOfTheWasp #NetGalley

Tom Clancy is turning over in his grave. Second sentence: Eighty-one year old Ernie Keene, former corporal, United States Navy.... Really? Corporal? From here I expected the book to get worse but thankfully it did not. This became a typical Op-Center story with lots of bad guys, dead guys, and twists and turns to keep any reader happy.

Still using the name of a dead man as author. A good story; it could be happening today, which is, I suppose, the point. Bad jihadists, good Occidentals, even if the latter are squabbling amongst themselves. A realistic tale.

A really good book. It starts with the US interdicting an illegal shipment heading to the Middle East. The head of the organization vows revenge and in a brazen attack, hits the US and smiles while he is doing it. Thus starts a saga where a disgraced head of Op Center chases after the terrorist to stop and future attacks and win back his honor. Thank you Netgalley, Jeff Rovin , St. Martin's Press and St. Martin's Griffin for the ARC for my review.