"DEADLY GAMES"

The story has a spin to it that touches our lives in 2003. Practice Run is the name of the best selling computer game in history in the book, and the man who created it, Tyler Bryant, is the game king. Every kid on the face of the earth is addicted to it. This is one video game that even parents love because to get to the next level of play, the player must read long passages of text, and must retain what he or she reads to be able to continue. It promotes reading, education, literacy. It also does something that no one knows about...

It programs kids, through subliminal imaging and steganography, to reject the notion of God and religion because, in the words of the man who created it, every atrocity since the beginning of time has been committed in the name of God, with 9/11 being the epitome in our lifetime. And he's not entirely wrong.

But he's mad. And his madness prompts a truly frightening prospect: if a player is really good, he or she get to play Tyler himself, the creator of the game, online, one on one. When they win playing him, they join the Winner's Circle and get a special version of the game that is tailored toward them and their individual personalities. What the Winner's Circle game does is turn them into killers. A rabbi is pulled to his death by a student just as the subway train pulls into the platform. A girl making her confirmation pulls a gun from her little white purse and shoots a cardinal and herself. A boy hugs a preacher at the Crystal Cathedral, setting off a suicide bomb in his jacket. A boy in Egypt stabs a cleric outside a mosque. And many more.

None of the murders connect; it seems they are all teens who have gone berserk. Until Quinn Roberts, the heroine of the book, who runs a foundation in DC that gives away computers to kids all over the world for educational purposes and is married to Tyler, puts together that the common denominator that the murderers share is they were all members of the Practice Run Winner's Circle. Then she must stop her husband, by Easter Sunday, when the new version of the game is released and all hell will break loose. To stop the evil, she has to enlist the aid of his younger brother--who is in prison in Arizona for hacking into the Pentagon--and it's a chase and race against time to prevent the new game from being shipped and to stop the last programmed teen, who, they believe, is out to kill the Pope.

A modern day "Manchurian Candidate," it has real echoes after 9/11 and the crisis in the Catholic church and this notion of killing in the name of God, ultimately saying that no one and nothing can erase faith from our lives, that God is ultimately love, not hate.

And it's a real cool thriller to boot!

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