After those long brutal weeks we went through, I was surprised any of us came out of it alive. We were tired, battered and bloody but we were still gamely standing despite what had been thrown at us. When Jack had appeared at the front door with tanks at his back, I could have cried through sheer relief. He had no idea how grateful I was he had arrived in time. "After escaping from hell, should anyone be expected to return again? Even if it means getting a ticket home?"

"Jack wanted nothing more than to sit on the porch and enjoy the finer things in life. When that all changed, he threw himself into the fight of his life to survive for a chance to return to what he loved." A large group of teenagers are abducted by aliens and told that if they wish to get home, they have to fight for it. After some minor initial training, they are dropped on a planet where they must fight the hostile local inhabitants. Their initial belief that it is all a bizarre game is wrong and despite everything they had been told to the contrary, it really is a fight for survival. What they go through over a period of four weeks of fighting turns out to be horrific. The relationships they form amongst themselves to survive and the way they cope with losing each other is in stark contrast to their initial confidence and their naive belief in what they had been told. Their shock when they realise that they had been betrayed forces them to come to terms with the fact that they can only rely on each other to escape their predicament alive, if not in one piece.

Brothers Jeremy (age 10) and Reggie (age 14) are expert Echo's Revenge gamers. After initiating Operation Thunderbolt, they begin their journey down the West Coast only to discover that Echo-7, a new and indestructible game predator, has developed the ability to reverse the rules of its own video game and hunt them down- in the real world. Sean Austin's investigation and search for Echo-7 continues, at echohunt.com.