By Trent Reedy
Five of the country's best gamers are flown to a tech mogul's headquarters for a robot-battle tournament, and slowly realize the game is real.
Rogan lives for a virtual-reality game called Laser Viper, so when the game's famous creator invites him and four other top players to a private tournament, it's a dream: luxury dorms, cutting-edge gear, and digital battles fought as powerful war robots. Then the missions get stranger. The enemy soldiers move in ways real code shouldn't allow, glitches keep breaking through, and the fighting starts to feel far too real. What the five of them uncover is that the tournament was never really a game, and stopping the man who built it means turning their skills against him. It's the meatiest book on this shelf and the one that pushes a game-obsessed reader into a full, fast thriller.
For a child who has beaten every level of every game and swears novels are dull, this hands them a book that runs like the games they love, a tournament, a leaderboard, robot combat, and then does something a game can't: it makes the wins cost something. The gaming detail is thick enough that a player feels at home, and the mystery underneath, why does the game feel so real, is the engine that keeps them turning pages. At 336 pages it's a genuine full-length novel, so it suits an older, more confident reader ready for a real story rather than a picture on every page.