Walter Winkler is a Seattle street kid who can Google Minds. Not that he can help it. Who wants to know what people are really thinking?
His shelter shrink dismisses Mind Googling as mere schizophrenia and worse, intends to ‘cure him” if he keeps having “delusions” of getting sucked into other people’s heads.
Nicknamed 'Pinball,' Walter has a gift for seeing inside games, too. He doesn’t play by the rules. He plays with the code. Avoids the monsters. Always beats the game.
Then Walter is lured into testing “Holotar: Last Queen of the White Shamans,” a new kind of holographic fantasy game designed by a mad Russian. Walter is beguiled into promising the ‘Last Queen’ that he will rescue her child being held captive in Siberia. He also discovers that the game has been hacked by a very real monster, an ancient psychopath unleashed into the new world of massively multiplayer online games and social networks, who is preying on young gamers – like him.
Walter sets out on a journey from Seattle to Siberia and back to fulfill his promise to the Queen and to help the gamers find their monster before it finds him. The odyssey propels him Googling through the minds of a cast of eccentric characters, including Paolo, a Brazilian game executive with a past; Leggs, a rehabbed homeless teen prostitute; and unfortunately, into the mind of a twisted monster named Gvlek.
Holotar: Last Queen of the White Shamans is an urban fantasy, psychological thriller. There are consequences for creating and unleashing real and imagined monsters. Because sometimes, once they get in your head, monsters just won’t die.
