The End of the Game by Warren Murphy

The End of the Game by Warren Murphy

It doesn’t seem like it should, but this novel actually worked. The villain is a young genius game designer who is totally bored with life. The only enjoyment he gets is in manipulating people (or nations) into doing things out of character. He is ridiculously wealthy and he uses his money first to addict people to spending and then (with the threat of removing that money) to get them to do inappropriate (or even horrible) things. When he decides to end his boredom by getting the Soviets and the U.S. to launch their nuclear missiles at each other and start World War III, CURE becomes involved.

 

This is a very quick moving, very light-hearted, Destroyer adventure. The villain can never quite be taken seriously and the threats are never quite severe enough to make us genuinely worry about Remo, but the story works anyway.