This is an Audible-only, FREE (for a month) novella, read by Zachary Quinto. For more about this and the future text edition, look here. I'm not normally into audiobooks--what with the speed reading it's a little slow for me--but this was a pretty good one to listen to on a long drive yesterday.
The setup is that ten years ago, people discovered that murder victims--and only murder victims--can now come back to life, poofing away from the scene of the crime and waking up in their homes, naked, but otherwise in the same physical condition they were several hours ago. Is that a miracle of God, especially with the locating? Anyway, this has led to a new job description of "dispatcher," a person with a literal license to kill someone if they are near death. Dispatchers do shifts in hospitals or can take side jobs for rich people doing death-defying sports or dueling (that came back), on movie sets, or working at secret fight clubs. There's definitely "gray areas" those side jobs can end up in.
Our narrator, Tony Valdez, is a dispatcher who gets roped into helping the police (a sympathetic lady named Langdon, I think? I can't check spelling on an audiobook) when a fellow dispatcher, Jimmy, goes missing. Tony was "friendly, but not friends" with Jimmy, which sounds like an interesting distinction when you find out that the two were in a bowling league together that turned into a group that was lining up "gray area" jobs. Tony's quit doing stuff like the fight club--he's cagey about hinting that he's done super gray area jobs in the past but won't specify--but has Jimmy quit like he said he would? Tony traces Jimmy's disappearance to working for a rich guy and dispatching his wife with cancer over and over again every time a new treatment didn't work--except now the wife's died. The employer wants to know: how likely is it for a dispatch to fail? Once in a thousand times, Tony says. So how come Jimmy had one fail twice? Combining that with the rich guy's ties to a former mob-bish family....well, something's definitely shifty here and it's up to Tony and his knowledge to figure this out, risking his own life in the bargain.
I generally enjoyed the story and Zachary Quinto's narration. I love the concept of dispatch and how it works, the theological debate about it, and what one would have to resort to doing if they really wanted to murder someone these days. I liked how Tony was informative yet cagey and vague, that was a good strategy to take when talking with law enforcement. I liked his partnership with Langdon, which somehow to me seemed to have a bit of romantic intention (or at least, I think it's an eyebrow-raiser to compare her asking him about his job to how it goes for him on dates), and then goes very cold when she's all, "TELL ME you didn't work fight clubs." And then it comes back from that later on.
About the only quibble I have with the story is that it's really repetitive in a few places. Like the first few chapters are very "Tell me how this world works even though we've been living in it for ten years," and "So how does it feel to murder people in your job?" when clearly he's only murdering on a technicality in order to save lives and I think that'd be a totally different thing. Of course you've got to do some exposition when you're introducing a new world situation, but it was a bit much occasionally for me. It's very rehash-y of the action and questions at points, but I suspect maybe that's something you do when you are writing for an audiobook deliberately and know that people are going to need a bit more rehashing when they miss details while listening. That's probably a good practice to employ, really.
Now as to Audible, this was my first time using the product and .... uh, let's just say I had some problems getting their download program to work. It was insisting that I close my Chrome browser over and over and over again so it could make some changes to it even though the browser WAS closed and it was doing that even after I rebooted the computer a few times...grrr, argh, WHYYYYYY. I eventually got the thing to download and install after probably an hour of wrangling and once that got done all was well, but it was not cooperating well for me overall for about 24 hours thanks to that pop-up message. Just putting that that out there.
Overall, I'm giving it three and a half stars. This was a cool world to get to visit and I liked it muchly. I'd read more here.
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