I’m not sure how I missed these novellas by John Scalzi. I love Scalzi and have read almost everything he’s written, so imagine my surprise when I was browsing through Audible and found this little gem, of which I had been completely unaware. And Zachary Quinto narrates the audiobooks, so that was all I needed to know.
I listened to The Dispatcher last year and just recently got around to listening to the sequel: Murder by Other Means. Since they’re both so short, I’ll just review both of them here.
The books take place in modern-day Chicago, and I was pleased that Scalzi actually seemed to know which streets went which direction and where certain neighborhoods were located, since I’ve read some books that failed miserably in that department *cough* dark matter *cough*.
The premise of the books is that, as of a few years ago, people who have been murdered don’t stay dead anymore. Instead, they turn up at home, in bed, completely naked, but safe and sound. Whatever mess they made when they died just vanishes, except for their clothes and whatever they had on them at the time (although any implants they have go with them).
No one knows why this happens or how, exactly, it works, especially since it doesn’t work 100% of the time. About 1 in 1,000 murders will result in the permanent death of the victim and there’s no way to know when the murder will be permanent.
And it only works for murder. Anyone who commits suicide or dies a natural death dies permanently.
You might think this would lead to a drastic reduction in murder cases, but it just changes the game. Now there are licensed dispatchers whose job it is to kill people.
One of the most common and steadiest (and most legal) jobs for a dispatcher is to work in a hospital. The insurance company now requires a dispatcher to be in the operating room, so if things go south, the dispatcher can step in and intentionally murder the person (accidental deaths don’t count as murder, apparently) to make sure they end up back home in bed and they can try the surgery again another day, this time prepared for whatever went wrong the first time.
In theory, there is no limit to the number of times you can kill someone and have them reappear afterwards. The first book turned out to be a case in which a man kept trying experimental treatments on his wife who was dying of cancer. Every time a treatment didn’t work, they would kill her and start over until one time when she vanished, as expected, but did not reappear in her bed. Finally, they realized she had reappeared on their boat because that was where she felt safe. She didn’t feel safe at home because she kept getting killed there.
In the course of trying to solve this murder, the main character, Tony Valdez, gets caught up with one of the biggest families in organized crime in Chicago. He ends up having to do a favor for them, which means they still owe him a favor in return at the end of the book. At one point, they conclude a meeting with Tony by throwing him down an elevator shaft because it will get him home faster than if they drive him (assuming he doesn’t stay dead).
Tony is less than thrilled with this arrangement, especially since they didn’t clear it with him beforehand, but when you work with mob bosses, you take what you can get.
The second novella, Murder by Other Means, starts with Tony doing a job that is less than legal. A law firm wants to hire him to kill their client so he can instantly appear in his home in Beijing and complete a business deal before his competitor can reach Beijing by plane. Since it’s illegal to use a dispatcher as transportation, and they recognize there’s a chance it won’t work as planned, they have a suicide note all ready to go to explain the client’s death. Tony demands $25,000 as compensation for the risk he’s taking, and they pay after minor squabbling over the amount, and once it’s done, they pay in cash.
Tony knows he can’t take it all to the bank without it looking suspicious, so he spends as much of it as he can, puts a bunch in his personal safe at home, and takes the rest to his local bank, which is robbed almost as soon as he hands the money over (which is actually a good thing, because that means it’s insured). The bank manager is killed in the course of the heist, then the four robbers congregate in the lobby and one robber shoots the other three, point blank. The first two disappear, as planned, but the third one stays dead. The robber left alive swears and keeps shooting at him, but he’s dead and he’s not coming back. When the cops show up and see the gun, they shoot the one robber left standing, and he vanishes.
Of course Tony is questioned by the police, not only because he was present for a bank robbery, but because it turns out the robber who stayed dead knew Tony and had contact with him shortly before the heist. It turns out he was offering Tony a gig, but Tony refused.
So, in order to prove he doesn’t belong on the suspect list, Tony has to help them solve the case, which includes talking to dispatchers who are making their living doing less-than-legal jobs and reconnecting with his old pal, the mob boss. Also, his downstairs neighbor lit her entire apartment on fire, and the stairway, and someone put an oil drum outside Tony’s back door. Fortunately, Tony wasn’t home at the time, but it would have been a pretty effective way to kill him and make sure he stayed dead. No one else in the apartment building was harmed.
Then other people around Tony start committing suicide left and right, specifically, people who were involved in the bank robbery and/or the job Tony performed right before the robbery. Thanks to Tony’s old friend the mob boss, he finds out that because the Beijing client was in such a rush to get back home, he had to work with people outside his normal circle, people he doesn’t trust, which means they’re loose ends, including him. So they get some thugs to show up and threaten to hurt their loved ones unless they commit suicide. They can’t kill anyone, but they can cause a lot of pain while keeping the victim alive, and they make sure their intended victim knows all about their favorite techniques.
Ultimately, they end up arresting the guy back in China, which they’re able to do because he violated a bunch of Chinese laws as well as American laws, and they get the attorney who was doing his client’s dirty work for him in Chicago.
If you like the typical mysteries featuring a grizzled P.I., you’ll enjoy these books, although I don’t think it’s exactly clear what makes Tony so gruff, other than his weird job. He doesn’t have any family to speak of, and he doesn’t even seem to have friends. He’s friendly with some other dispatchers (as he notes, it’s a “small community”), but he doesn’t seem to hang out with them. He does form a sort of friendship with the detective he keeps working cases with, but she’s not exactly cuddly either.