The Dispatcher by John Scalzi – Review

Published: October 4, 2016

Publisher: Audible Studios

Genre: Science Fiction

Series: Standalone

Length: 2 hours 18 min

My Rating: 4.0/5.0

Synopsis:

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 a supposed 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.

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I’ve been loving the Audible Originals feature that Audible added earlier this year (or was it the end of last year??) and it’s given me a chance to explore some new genres and novellas that I wouldn’t have otherwise purchased. Now, John Scalzi is an author I’ve read before and have always had good reading experiences so I fully expected The Dispatcher to be pretty cool. I wasn’t disappointed and found it to be surprisingly fulfilling despite it’s short page count.

First of all, Zachary Quinto narrates and does an exceptional job and I’d definitely recommend the audio version if you have the opportunity. Secondly, the story was WAY awesome for a novella. In other novella reviews I’ve mentioned that sometimes novellas can be lacking due to their short length. That wasn’t at all the case here and found this to be a nice dip into a cool world where if you’re murdered 99.9% of the time you’ll appear minutes later in your own home, alive and well and entirely naked. People quickly figured out this was a game changer for how life worked and also an opportunity to create a new industry and, practically by default, a new sort of shady business. Use your imagination here folks, I won’t spoil any fun in what amounts to a 2 hour long audiobook.

Overall, I thought The Dispatcher was pretty great, and while I wouldn’t have paid for such a short audiobook, I practically swooped in on it when Audible offered it for free (which it still is last I checked on Amazon).