Booklog 13/2022: John Scalzi: The Dispatcher – Dispatcher #1

Audiobook. 2 hours 18 minutes. This is probably a short novella length not a full novel, but it packs a lot in. Tony Valdez is a licensed dispatcher, he kills people for a living in order to save their lives. Some years earlier, murder victims began reappearing, alive and naked, in their own beds. No one knows how or why, so just take it as a given. Dispatchers, working legally, murder people who are already at death's door, so that they reset themselves in the condition they were some six hours earlier. It's a brilliant recovery for (say) accident victims, and it's also used for dangerous medical procedures. The dispatcher is on hand in surgery, so if a procedure goes wrong they can reset the patient to before the procedure started. It doesn't heal them, but it gives the surgeon another chance in the full knowledge of what went wrong last time. Those are the legitimate dispatches, but there's a grey area, private commissions etc. OK, so that's the background. One of Tony's dispatcher colleagues, Jimmy, is missing and it looks like a grey area case. Jimmy's wife blames Tony for (some years ago) leading him into those gret areas. Tony is 'clean' now, but suspects Jimmy is not. He's coerced into working with a Chicago police woman to solve the mystery of the missing Jimmy. It's a short listen, but engaging. Performed beautifully by Zachary Quinto.