The Malice Box by Martin Langfield

Michael Joseph, £12.99

Scavenger by David Morrell

Headline, £19.99

IT IS HARD TO BLAME authors for writing for Hollywood. Few things can be more satisfying, or lucrative, as seeing your characters – if, occasionally, not your plot – transferred to the big screen.

These days it can be transferred to the computer screen too. Penguin’s Michael Joseph imprint launched its “lead thriller” of 2007 not just as paper between hard covers but as an online blog and game with a “mystery holiday prize”. With guff like that spewing out of the publicity machine, I was tempted to hate The Malice Boxwithout reading a word of it.

After about 50 pages of Martin Langfield’s debut, however, I began to come round to this fancy about a group of Cambridge undergraduates growing up together but still retreating on occasion to play versions of the “scavenger hunts” in which they had indulged at college.

Adam, the exotic, flawed, gamesmaster, is a latterday Se-banstian Flyte, the beautiful Katherine a bewitching Julia, Robert Reckliss a reincarnated Charles Ryder and modern Manhattan a suitably seductive, yet sinister, backdrop.

Then it starts to get strange. By the time that Adam’s promiscuous lover Ter-ri turns up it has metamorphosed from Brideshead Revisited into Harry Potter with nipple clamps. But that makes it sound more exciting than it should. The brief interludes of rough sex break the monotony as Reckliss romps around Manhattan with a GPS phone interpreting one bit of dreadful doggerel after another to undergo a series of “tests” that seem pointless unless dreamt up by the New York tourist board.

The plot turns out to be a war between the forces of good and evil (they just won’t go away) who see each other’s auras (cue special effects) and absorbing energy (ditto). Yawn.

The ending transforms Reckliss into a super being (see Neo in The Matrix) who will stop a spiritual 9/11 by preventing the detonation of a “soul bomb” in another incomprehensible blaze of special effects that don’t work on paper.

I can see the movie. I just wish I hadn’t read the book.

David Morrell’s Scavenger is scarily similar, although it would help to have read Morrell’s previous offering Creepers, as his hero and heroine start this novel scarred by their experiences in it.

An interest in time capsules, which seems to mean to most Americans anything buried more than 40 years ago, leads to them drugged and the woman kidnapped. He wakes up in hospital wondering what happened; she wakes up locked in a house full of strangers under orders from a secret gamesmaster to complete a series of tests to escape alive. Maybe this is designed to be a computer game rather than a movie. Cardboard characters but lots of bombs and bangs and a lot less pretension.

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