One from the Del Rey Discovery series...
This was a fun book, but I wasn't quite as impressed with it as with others in the series.
It takes place in the future, within a Roman-themed role-playing game. About 3000 wealthy socialites pay good money to physically go live in a recreated Roman town within their modern city, and live out their fantasies or try to acquire points and become emperor. But one of the two head programmers is noticing some disturbing anomalies in the programs that run the holographic Roman gods... and when the latest Emperor turns up dead-for-real, his investigation begins to uncover a web of crime and corruption infiltrating what was meant to be a harmless game.
The story definitely had a lot of potential, but the technical nuts-and-bolts of the setup had a lot of holes. I almost got the impression that the author had initially conceived of the game as being a virtual-reality game, and only later decided to make it a physical role-playing game. The main character doesn't seem as informed about the game and its setup as he would have had to be in his position, and, simply for safety and convenience issues, I didn't buy that it would possibly have been so hard to get *out* of the game area and out into the city. The 'gods' seem to have far more physical power than a 'hologram' would... etc, etc. ( )