The Dispatcher: Travel by Bullet
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4.4 • 41 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
From Hugo-winning author John Scalzi comes The Dispatcher: Travel by Bullet, which clocks in at over 40,000 words, the longest novella yet in the series.
The world has changed. Now, when someone is murdered, they almost always come back to life—and there are professionals, called “dispatchers,” who kill in order to save lives, to give those near the end a second chance. Tony Valdez is a dispatcher, and he has never been busier.
But for as much as the world has changed, some things have stayed the same. Greed, corruption and avarice are still in full swing. When Tony is called to a Chicago emergency room by an old friend and fellow dispatcher, he is suddenly and unwillingly thrown into a whirlpool of schemes and plots involving billions of dollars, with vast caches of wealth ranging from real estate to cryptocurrency up for grabs.
All Tony wants to do is keep his friend safe. But it’s hard to do when friends keep secrets, enemies offer seductive deals, and nothing is ever what it seems. The world has changed…but the stakes are still life and death.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hugo Award winner Scalzi has a good deal of fun in his hard-boiled third Dispatcher adventure (after The Dispatcher: Murder By Other Means), returning to an alternate present in which people who are murdered reappear in a place they feel safe and professional "dispatchers" kill those dying of natural causes to give them a second chance. Dispatcher Tony Valdez is called into the emergency room to save Mason Schilling, a fellow dispatcher with a more dubious approach to the work who has just thrown himself out of a moving car, and reluctantly accepts a secret handoff of a cryptocurrency wallet before dispatching Mason. Around the same time, a crypto entrepreneur dies apparently by suicide at a party for the rich and famous. Now police and one-percenters alike are after information—and Valdez and Mason are in the crosshairs. This episode extends to novel length, but the feeling is still of a novella: the pacing is fast, the dialogue is crisp, and Scalzi's expectation that his readers understand tech keeps exposition to a minimum. The cast largely plays within the roles established in previous stories, so those hoping for more growth or forward momentum may be disappointed. Still, many series fans will be content with more of the same under this unusual premise.
