It's a scenario most online gamers are familiar with, two teams of five trying to outwit, outshoot, and outplay the opposing team to move up in the rankings. Overworld is clearly a descendant of League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm but it's played in an immersive virtual reality accessed through your djinni, an implant in your brain. For Marisa, "Heartbeat" and her four friends that make up the Cherry Dogs the game is more important than reality. They aren't high in the rankings but Marisa has made a few radical plays that have generated some buzz in the community and they hope to be invited to upcoming tournament. When they aren't playing matches they're training, replaying the matches of their competition, and at night they go clubbing and party hard. Typical slacker teenagers until one of the Cherry Dogs uses a new "drug" called Bluescreen.

In 2050 the mega city of Los Angeles covers Southern California down into Mexico. The rich are ultra rich and everyone else gets by as they can. Marisa's family lives in a barrio called Mirador that's just this side of a slum because the local mob lord employs his own "police" to enforce good behavior from the gangs...as long as you pay for his protection. Her parents own a restaurant and her elderly abuela does the home cooking while she reminisces about the good old days of music and gaming. I liked the casual reference to the current generation of games. There are also two younger siblings and one older brother "who is dead to us" according to Marisa's father because he joined a gang. The world building reflects deep concerns about a family honestly trying to get by as the gap between the rich and everyone else continues to grow.

Marisa is just an obsessed gamer and hacker extraordinaire hanging with her friends until a new drug called "Bluescreen" enters the picture. Instead of pills its a program passed around on little chips that you connect to your djinni. (I had flashbacks to my college days when we were passing around bootleg copies of Civ 1 on floppy disks.) Simply run the program and you are flooded with enough stimuli that your djinni, and brain, are forced to reboot. I know people try some crazy drugs but seriously, crashing you brain entirely? Fortunately, Marisa may be a party girl but even she draws the line at Bluescreen and just says no. 

Bluescreen users are supposed to simply fall unconscious while everything "reboots" but Marisa's friend does bazaar things like running into traffic with no memory afterwards of doing anything. Marisa suspects Bluescreen is granting someone else access to the users djinni and taking control of them. She begins investigating the handsome drug supplier but she ends up saving his life and enlists his aid in tracking down the source of Bluescreen. The Cherry Dogs both local and global are also putting their hacking skills to good use, while her one friend who always refused to get a djinni is their "invisible" man on the ground. Marisa also enlists the aid of her estranged brother and his gang but some friends aren't really on her side and everything ends up in a chaotic free for all humanity's free will at stake. 

Is it brilliant? No, but I definitely wanted to keep reading and find out how it all worked out. The Overworld gaming obsession strikes a chord that I think will appeal to most ToJ folks, and the opening 5v5 scenario is well done. For me there is a Shadowrun RPG feel to it which may or may not be intentional. There are echoes of the Decker and Rigger in Marisa, plus her friend Sahara is definitely a Face. For some reason I can't quite pinpoint I also think Bluescreen might appeal to fans of the Gentleman Bastards series (Lies of Locke Lamora etc). Dire warnings to "just say no to drugs" and protect yourself online are obvious but stop short of beating a dead horse. 

Dan Wells was a new author for me but he has a couple of sci-fi series. The Audible version of Bluescreen is narrated by Roxanne Hernandez and has four stars.