The God Game by Danny Tobey

Published by St. Martin's Press on January 7, 2020

A group of nerdish high school students found each other in the school’s tech lab and formed a group that pulls pranks. They call themselves the Vindicators. Charlie, Peter, Kenny, Alex, and Vanhi are now in their senior year. Vanhi is Charlie’s best female friend but she’s a lesbian so he has no chance with her. Charlie has long had the hots for a different girl, but she’s dating an entitled son of a banker who captains the football team.

Peter introduces Charlie to a website that calls itself G.0.D. and is either an Artificial Intelligence, a real god, or some sort of demon, depending on the perspective of the person interacting with it. G.0.D. issues challenges to Charlie and eventually to the rest of the Vindicators. It also seems to be watching them, as evidenced by texts that refer to things the Vindicators have recently done.

After playing an initiation prank, the Vindicators are invited to play the God Game. Winners have all their real-life dreams come true. The catch is, players who die in the game also die in real life, and death is the only way to leave the game. This is a jealous G.O.D. who expects to be worshipped. The Vindicators don’t really believe that they will be murdered for losing a game, although Peter reminds them that it’s not really murder if God does it.

The struggle to come up with a sensible explanation for G.O.D.’s apparent omniscience — something the Vindicators can’t do for most of the novel — is a hook that keeps the reader involved. The novel’s best moments come when the game forces its players to make moral choices with real world consequences. Should Vanhi sabotage Charlie to improve her chances of admission to Harvard?

The novel’s comparison of the game to a religion is also intriguing. A popular view of religion suggests that God is always testing people; testing their faith or their virtue or their ability to withstand suffering. The game takes testing to a new level.

On the downside, the story is built on clichéd characters. The bully who is keeping his sexual identity locked in a closet. The pretty girl who likes a nerd but only dates the popular boys. The kid from a religious family who questions religion. And, of course, the computer nerds who are ubiquitous in fiction. Even the nerds have clichéd problems: parents who demand perfection, parents who are cheating on each other, parents who are failures, friends who betray their friendship. I appreciate the effort to build characters, but all the clichés swell the novel to twice the word count that the story merits. A shorter and tighter story would have more appealing.

Still, I liked The God Game, albeit more for its concept than its execution. The novel repeatedly makes the point that credulous cretins who lurk on the web will believe just about anything (the continued belief in the QAnon conspiracy is sufficient proof that weak minds are easily manipulated). I particularly like this passage: “The optimists said the Web would give every human a voice. Holy shit! Have you met humans? We created God to protect us from ourselves.”

The notion that a computer program might begin to think of itself as a deity has been done before, but the concept (and maybe this is a spoiler, so fair warning) of a game that crowdsources morality, inviting players to judge the actions of others, is a new twist. The redefinition of what it means to be “saved,” morphed from a religious perspective to the context of data (a rewriting of old files with new ones, perhaps symbolic of a new life), is clever.

The story requires an even larger suspension of disbelief than is common in modern thrillers. G.0.D. sees all and controls everything that has a processor, an unrealistic proposition for even the most powerful app. Players seem willing to do just about anything the games requires of them, including the infliction of mayhem (creating the improbable scenario of gamers abandoning their screens and doing something physically active). But novel’s improbability is overshadowed by the interesting moral choices that G.O.D. forces the players to make.

The God Game will probably be more appealing to young adults than mature readers. All the teen angst the characters experience is wearying. The novel seems to end on a surprising note that is uncharacteristic of YA fiction, but ultimately cops out by reversing the apparent surprise. Notwithstanding its faults, the book has sufficient merit to make it worthwhile even for a jaded adult.

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Ghoster by Jason Arnopp

Published by Orbit on October 22, 2019

Ghoster is a clever variation on a ghost story. It suggests a supernatural basis for the supernatural hold that smartphones have over their users. Are we the masters of our gadgets or, by wiring ourselves to the digital world, have we become lost souls?

Kate Collins thought her luck had finally changed. After dating a string of losers, she met Scott with an assist from Tinder. Convinced that he would be the one to save her from a life of loneliness, she agreed to move in with him. He has a nice apartment with a sea view but it is in a different city, so she gives up her lease and quits her job as a paramedic and readies herself for a new life.

A few days before the scheduled move, Scott goes silent. Texts receive no response. Voicemails go unanswered. When the movers arrive, she has them load up her property and races to Scott’s place ahead of them. Convinced that Scott is not answering the door because he is seriously injured, she breaks in and finds that the place is empty, all the furniture gone, with no clue as to Scott’s whereabouts. Was he abducted and killed? Kate assumes the worst until her best friend tells her that Scott is still posting on social media. The realization that she has been played by Scott is even worse than her fear that Scott was dead.

Having nowhere else to go, Kate squats in the apartment. She finds Scott’s apparently discarded iPhone, figures out his password, and becomes obsessed with the phone’s content. Apart from the usual treasury of porn and a record of Scott’s Tinder contacts, she finds videos of sleeping people and Scott's online diary. None of that is quite as disturbing as the sudden appearance of Scott’s less charming twin brother, the fresh scratch marks at the door, and the occasional appearance of a blue spectral figure.

Ghoster creates the suspense that readers of horror stories demand. For much of the novel, ambiguity drives the plot. Is Scott dead or is he playing a nasty trick on Kate? Is Scott’s brother simply self-centered or is he malicious? Is Scott’s apartment haunted or is there a logical explanation for the phenomena that bewilder Kate? The story works because the reader is never quite sure where it will go.

Kate’s chatty first-person narration also contributes to the novel’s success. Jason Arnopp’s lively prose and his sympathetic portrayal of Kate make the novel an easy and fun read. The story’s message — we should all think about our enslavement to smartphones — is all the more resonant because it never gets in the way of an engaging plot.

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Mr. Nobody by Catherine Steadman

Published by Ballantine Books on January 7, 2020

Mr. Nobody combines a medical thriller with a lost-memory thriller. On both fronts, the novel achieves only modest success.

Dr. Emma Lewis is an English psychiatrist who has an interest in memory disorders. She wrote a paper arguing that certain patients who suffer from a fugue state have been misdiagnosed as malingerers. In rare instances, she believes a fugue state can be attributed to traumatic stress rather than a neurological disorder.

An American neuroscientist, preeminent in the field, refers a patient who turned up on an English beach near Norfolk. The press have labeled the patient Mr. Nobody. This could be the case that makes Emma’s career, but the hospital where Mr. Nobody is being treated is in a town that Emma fled long ago, leaving tragedy and her birth identity behind. She has to work up the courage to return and hopes that nobody will recognize her. Of course, her hopes are promptly shattered when Mr. Nobody calls her by her former name.

Mr. Nobody (hospital staff eventually call him Matthew) has a desperate desire to connect with Emma but he can’t remember why. Matthew reminds Emma of her father, leading to melodramatic sentences like: “The look in his eyes, it reminds her of someone a long time ago, but it can’t be, it can’t be him.” Since Matthew is clearly too young to be Emma’s father, it isn’t clear why she even entertains the possibility. The military take an interest in Matthew, thinking he might be a missing soldier, a theory that might explain the fighting skills Matthew displays when another patient threatens Emma with a cane.

Secondary characters of note include a police officer who knew Emma back in the day and the officer’s wife, a reporter who is investigating the Mr. Nobody story, much to the displeasure of the police. The officer can’t tell his wife anything (she would blow Emma’s changed identity if given the chance), which causes some marital discord. That plotline eventually leads to a predictable resolution.

Most of the novel’s characterization is reserved for Emma. She comes across as a typical thriller protagonist who is forced to confront the past from which she is trying to escape. Her childhood trauma seems insufficient to warrant her change of identity, and the novel’s ultimate lesson — only you can change yourself — loses its value when applied to a character who is clearly smart enough to have internalized the lesson long before her encounter with Matthew.

The attempt to give Emma’s life a feel-good ending is forced. The plot creates more interest than suspense, if only because it follows a circuitous route to its less than credible destination. Catherine Steadman plants a few false flags, one of which supposedly reveals Matthew’s true identity well before the novel ends. A savvy reader will know that there is more to Matthew’s story. An information dump in the final pages offers a needlessly complicated and improbable explanation of how Matthew wormed his way into Emma’s life. The selective nature of Matthew’s memory loss and his ability to manipulate it is just too convenient to be credible. Some of the story reminded me of the movie Memento, which covers much of the same ground more convincingly.

On the other hand, Steadman’s prose is competent when she isn’t resorting to tiresome descriptions of Emma’s distress. The story moves fairly quickly and the climatic action scene isn’t bad. Emma isn’t a shallow character, although Steadman gave me little reason to empathize with her messed up life. Readers with daddy issues might like her more than I did. I am recommending the book because the story held my interest, but I do so with reservations because this isn’t one of Thrillerworld’s better attempts to freshen the lost memory theme.

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Terminal Uprising by Jim C. Hines

Published by DAW on February 12, 2019

Terminal Uprising is the sequel to Terminal Alliance, in which we learned that humans have gone feral, not to say zombie-like. An alien race called the Krakau admitted Earth into its alliance after restoring some humans to a relatively normal condition. The process renders humans resistant to pain, which makes them useful as soldiers. Humans are feared on other worlds because they are hard to kill.

Marian “Mops” Adamopolous is a restored human who, in Terminal Alliance, was placed in charge of a team of janitors that maintained a Krakau military vessel. The mix of humans and nonhumans under Mops’ command are skilled cleaners and adept at repairing plumbing clogs. They used those skills in Terminal Alliance to overcome aliens who were plotting against them, but found themselves at odds with the Krakau, in part because they took command of a Krakau starship, the Pufferfish.

Having apparently committed treason against the Krakau, Mops and her team begin Terminal Uprising on the run. Mops is soon working with a Prodryan, a member of race that is at war with the Krakau and everyone else. The Prodryan delivers a message from one of Mops’ few remaining friends among the Krakau, an Admiral who tells her about a location on Earth that seems to be curing feral humans. Mops decides to go to Earth and investigate. Political intrigue ensues, followed by chases, explosions, and chaos.

Like the first novel, Terminal Uprising employs action and humor to tell a fun, fast-moving story. Much of the humor comes from the fact that Mops and her crew were originally assigned to sanitation. They rely on cleaning supplies rather than weapons to solve their problems. That joke threatens to wear thin in Terminal Uprising, but Jim C. Hines manages not to wear it out. Hines creates amusing aliens and finds humor in both human and alien behavior.

The novel ends on a hopeful note for the human race and sets up Mops for her next adventure. I don’t know that the premise would sustain a long series of novels, but Hines’ success with the second novel suggests that there is room for one more if Hines chooses to write it.

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Liars' Legacy by Taylor Stevens

Published by Kensington on December 31, 2019

The Russians are up to no good in Liars' Legacy, the second novel in Taylor Stevens’ Jack and Jill series. An American intelligence bureaucrat named Hayes is also up to no good, in the sense that he wants to further his own interests rather than the country’s.

The plot involves “a son trying to escape his mother’s past and hoping to find a father.” The father is Dimitri Vasiliev, a KGB officer, and the mother is Clare, who at the time of her pregnancy was an American agent in Moscow. Jack and Jill have been shaped by Clare to be world-class assassins. As one might expect, they didn’t receive the kind of nurturing from Clare that children crave, but like Johnny Cash’s legendary Boy Named Sue, adversity imposed by a parent teaches them to survive. That talent comes in handy, given the number of killers who try to take them out as the story unfolds.

Other key characters are also in the killing business. Kara works for a nebulous government agency that has decided to kill the assassins on the Broker’s list, a list that includes Chris Holden. Kara is an analyst rather than a trigger puller, but events force her into the field when she is assigned to a tactical team that chases a dangerous target — until the target starts chasing her team. Up the chain of command from Kara is Liv Wilson, “a politics-playing, ass kissing ladder climber,” a “woman who saw competence in other women as a threat to her own position and who’d sabotage in a hundred petty ways."

The story begins in the aftermath of the Broker’s death, the Broker having been established in Liar’s Paradox as “the man who played king against king and bartered souls for national secrets, who’d negotiated hits between buyers and assassins, and who’d forced order onto lawless chaos.” A couple of hit squads seem to be following Holden on a flight from Dallas to Frankfurt, but maybe things are not as they seem. Holden is following Jack and Jill, Jack’s ticket having been purchased by someone who claimed the ability to connect him with Dimitri, the father that the twins have never met. Jill is along for the ride to watch Jack’s back, although she hopes that the search for Dimitry will “put meaning to their mother’s past and make some sense of an upturned childhood.” Jack’s feelings about Clare are less complex; he hates her for forcing him to live a life of lies, always looking over his shoulder for real or imagined threats.

Frankfurt is a step on a journey to Berlin, where the players converge. The twins are tracking their father while the Russians, the Americans, and Holden are tracking the twins. Later destinations in the journey include Prague and the United States, where events transpire that include a Russian plan to sow chaos by assassinating one or more American politicians. Jack might be tasked with one of those killings in a twisty plot that always has the reader wondering whether Jack, Jill, Holden, and Kara will eventually succeed in killing each other as well as their targets or pursuers.

Stevens manages to keep the story moving at a steady pace without dumbing down the plot. She writes action scenes that compare favorably with the best action-thriller writers. Characterization is nevertheless her strength. Holden thinks Jill is “a few sane days shy of crazy,” an apt observation given her love-hate relationship with Jack, Clare, and the world. Holden, who was “delivered as a trophy” to the man who ordered his mother’s death, is nearly as complex as the twins. Yet while none of the characters act out of high moral purpose, save possibly for Kara, they are all capable of kindness and empathy.

Taylor Stevens has earned critical acclaim as a thriller writer, but I’m not sure she has the same following as lesser writers who churn out books that readers might find more comforting. Her childhood history is a compelling story and her experience overcoming adversity plainly informs her writing. I enjoyed her Vanessa Michael Munroe series and I’m now an equal fan of Jack and Jill.

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