The Dispatcher by John Scalzi

One day, not long from now, it becomes almost impossible to murder anyone - 999 times out of a thousand, anyone who is intentionally killed comes back. How? We don't know. But it changes everything: war, crime, daily life. Tony Valdez is a Dispatcher - a licensed, bonded professional whose job is to humanely dispatch those whose circumstances put them in death's crosshairs, so they can have a second chance to avoid the reaper. But when a fellow Dispatcher and former friend is apparently kidnapped, Tony learns that there are some things that are worse than death, and that some people are ready to do almost anything to avenge what they see as a wrong. It's a race against time for Valdez to find his friend before it's too late...before not even a Dispatcher can save him.

This was a great novella. Quinto does great on the audio narration and the dialog is classic Scalzi. Loved it!

Too short to give a higher rating.

A fun novella with an interesting ‘superpower' concept. Death is over, as long as death is done by means of murder. If you are intentionally killed by someone else you reappear where you were a few hours before, back in the same state that you were at that time. With that in mind a new type of agent is created to ‘dispatch' those on the brink of dying and so therefore allow them to reappear and survive.

An intriguing concept that is played through with a detective noir style in this story, where one of these agents tries to find out what has gone wrong with an attempted dispatch which did not work. The whole thing works really well in it novella format and I can see Scalzi has written at least one sequel that I will have to investigate. The writing is fun and engaging, the murky world is interesting and the characters well written. The reasoning behind this deathlessness is never really fully explained, but that lack of explanation is played with in the text itself. It is an interesting concept, if a bit silly, but taking the whole thing on faith leaves an interesting noir drama with a twist.

Very light-weight novella doing Scalzi at his peak: genre-blending noir and scifi with snappy dialogue and easy reading. It's designed to be an audiobook, and probably better in that medium, but I'm busy and this is a 30 minute read v. 3 hour audiobook?