Danger.com

Cray's new DANGER.COM series logs on with this hopping though obvious tale, priced (as an introductory offer) to fit any adolescent's budget. Feeling smothered by Jen, his longtime girlfriend, 16-year-old Jonah begins flirting with some girls he meets online, including the seductive Nicole, who proclaims them ""soul mates."" After he downloads Nicole's photo on his computer and decides she is ""a perfect 10,"" Jonah is all the more intrigued by his electronic pen pal, who one day shows up on his doorstep. But well before this too-awesome-to-be-true beauty appears in person, too-good-to-be-true things happen to Jonah and his family: quite possibly due to a computer glitch, the lazy student aces a trig exam to pull his D grade up to a B, and Jonah's father gets a much-coveted promotion when his competitor's acerbic memo is sent through the company e-mail ""by mistake."" But then things turn nasty as Cray throws all subtlety into cyberspace and the cottage in which Jonah's family is vacationing blows up with Jen inside. As unlikely and easy-to-predict as this caper is, Cray duplicates teen-speak unusually credibly and shapes a chilling villain sufficiently diabolical to make anyone wary of entering computer chat rooms. Young computer hackers won't have to stay off-line too long to finish this swiftly paced tale and likely will be willing to shell out the extra cash to pay $3.99 for the simultaneously released 2//Firestorm//, the series' second perilous ride down the information superhighway. Ages 10-up. (Oct.)