Deadly Games

by Anthony Masters

Jenny and David - twins whose close connection makes them understand each other without words -also share a secret of being able to see things other people can't... When a local homeless tramp disappears from their street, they decide to look for him for as they suspect the old man is ill and in need of medical help. They find him in an abandoned cinema, which is squatted by the local vagabonds, and the old man is taken to hospital with a chest infection. Jenny and David feel good about their deed, but they soon realise that curing his body is not enough when the old man's soul is haunted by some disturbing happenings of the past. Through the desolate wastelands of the city landscape, the Ghosthunter twins bravely follow mysterious apparitions of Leslie, May and Mrs Garland, who haunt old Sid giving him no rest. Will they be able to get to the bottom of the secret? Will they come through unscathed by this strange adventure? In Deadly Games," a fantasy for children and young adults first published in 1996, Anthony Masters cleverly interweaves exciting supernatural adventures with difficult themes of homelessness and social marginalisation.

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Anthony Masters was a writer, educator and humanitarian of exceptional gifts and prodigious energy. He was, in the parlance of his spiritual ancestors, the ancient mariners, that rare voyager "as gracious as a trade wind and as dependable as an anchor".

He leaves 11 works of adult fiction – notably, Conquering Heroes (1969), Red Ice (1986, with Nicholas Barker), The Men (1997), The Good and Faithful Servant (1999) and Lifers (2001) – and was in the process of completing another, Dark Bridges, which he thought would be his best. Many of these works carry deep insights into social problems that he gained, over four decades, by helping the socially excluded, be it by running soup kitchens for drug addicts or by campaigning for the civic rights of gypsies and other ethnic minorities.

His non-fiction output was typically eclectic. It ranged from the biographies of such diverse personalities as Hannah Senesh (The Summer that Bled, 1972), Mikhail Bakunin (Bakunin: the father of anarchism, 1974), Nancy Astor (Nancy Astor: a life, 1981) and the British secret service chief immortalised by Ian Fleming in his James Bond books (The Man Who Was M: the life of Maxwell Knight, 1984), to a history of the notorious asylum Bedlam (Bedlam, 1977).

Reviews

[Nim]

This book is about twins named Jenny and David who can see ghosts and discovers the truth behind a homeless person called Sid and the flickering images on the screen of a boarded-up cinema called the Roxy, which only themselves and Sid could see. It is quite a short book and I finished it in about one week, although I think I could've read it faster. I liked some of the words the author used to describe things.

[Indah Threez Lestari · Rating 2 out of 5]

316th - 2011