A Scalzi short- and it’s free!

This has been on my Audible recommendations list for what seems like months. I would’ve checked it out at some point – because John Scalzi – even if it wasn’t being offered as a free download, but that it was necessitated immediate consumption.

I can only imagine this was based on a random idea he had in the shower, or driving to the grocery store, and he decided to hammer out a quick 25,000 words (or whatever) before getting back to whatever his next novel is.

None of which is intended to disparage the story; it was entertaining, taught, and built on a pretty interesting concept: for some unknown reason, whenever a person is murdered, their body disappears and they are then brought back, naked, to a place at which they feel comfortable and safe (like their bed). This has numerous consequences  (dueling has come back, and there are murder clubs in the criminal underworld, where the poor are tasked with attacking each other for sport). The most important of these consequences is an agency of “dispatchers” with the authority to murder people to…..prevent their death (after, for instance, a botched medical procedure).

What follows is a pretty straight-forward mystery. A dispatcher has disappeared, and Tony Valdez teams up with a police officer to help track him down.

It’s ultimately a fun story, with brief moments of pretty serious brutality, and well worth the 2 hour runtime. Plus, the book is read by Zachary Quinto – who does a marvelous job. As soon as I finished, in fact, I checked to see what else Quinto has narrated, but unfortunately didn’t see anything that piqued my interest. That’s a shame.

So I don’t know if this should count towards my Cannonball (the book is free), but at the very least, posting here might interest some of you.