Travel by Bullet

I'm impressed by how far John Scalzi has been able to develop his 'Dispatcher' idea. With each novella 'The Dispatcher', 'Murder By Other Means' and 'Travel By Bullet' he has made the problem space generated by the idea more complex and the mysteries that his Dispatcher, Tony Valdez, has to solve, more and more interesting.

What makes 'Travel By Bullet' more than just another shake of the puzzle box is that as well as the plot of each book squeezing more juice from the Dispatcher lemon, it develops the character of Tony Valdez and deepens his relationships with the ensemble cast around him. In the first book, Tony was almost an anti-hero, uncomfortable with what he was doing and maintaining a self-protective emotional distance between show more himself and the people around him. By the end of the second book, Tony has gained some self-respect and some moral certainty and is moving towards working in law enforcement. In 'Travel By Bullet', Tony is caught up in conflicting loyalties and has to work hard to get people to trust him. By the end of it, he's a more interesting person.

Despite the character development, 'Travel By Bullet' is still essentially a puzzle book, with the same sort of structure that Asimov's 'Robot' books have: create a new set of rules, generate a new set of crimes that become possible because of the new set of rules, and figure out who the bad guys are and how to stop them.

This time, John Scalzi throws in a competition between ruthless, violent people to find a McGuffin (Valdez even calls it that), in the form of a crypto-box with something valuable on it.

For me, the book was enlivened by the way John Scalzi; took swipes at the compulsive, insatiable greed of billionaires; rolled in the impact of the pandemic on the Dispatcher business and put the risks of. cryptocurrency through its paces. It also helped that he wrapped the whole thing in sarcastic humour and kept the pace of the plot brisk.

I liked that the shape of the puzzle kept shifting in satisfying ways. The two billionaires were both grotesques but with different kinks. Bizarrely, it was the man who is trying to transition the organised crime syndicate that inherited into a legitimate operation with lower risks and higher returns, who came off as having the strongest ethics among these too-rich-to-be-able-to-spend-it-all people,

I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Zachary Quinto who does a great job of giving distinctive and appropriate voices to the main characters in the boo show less

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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WHAT'S TRAVEL BY BULLET ABOUT?
A recent pandemic* has resulted in all Dispatchers being strongarmed into working long and hard shifts in hospitals. Their work isn't that effective in light of the disease, but that doesn't change the requirement. In the middle of a shift, Tony Valdez is called to the ER.

* It was never named, but you're probably not wrong to assume it's one you recognize.

A friend (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) and colleague, who spends a lot more time on the morally ambiguous side of the vocation, is in the ER after throwing himself out of a moving vehicle and getting hit by a car. Clearly, things aren't going well for him. He looks to Tony for help, and show more well...things go bad from there.

The duo finds themselves mixed up with a handful of the city's richest and most powerful, who are busy trying to get the best of each other while staying off the radars of both the Chicago Police and the FBI.

As much as Tony might try to fool the reader/the police/himself, he's no stranger to the morally ambiguous—sure, he tries not to stray as far as his friend does, but still. Making this book, like the others in the series, another bit of Urban Fantasy Noir.

THE URBAN FANTASY-NESS
I've always thought there was a vaguely SF feel to this series like it's set a couple of decades in the future or something. In retrospect, I don't know why. It was just an impression I picked up. This one struck me as incredibly contemporary and made me feel pretty silly for thinking that about the others.

When I wasn't kicking myself for getting the chronology wrong, I spent a little time admiring the simplicity of Scalzi's approach to Urban Fantasy and how it makes The Dispatcher stories really stand out. In most UF, you get something like magic, or a lycanthrope, or a vampire—and then before you know it, you've got all of those. But here, this world is just one tweak away from our world—no wizards, no Fae, no were-anythings—just that murder almost always doesn't work (see earlier posts about this series for details if you want them, I don't want to reinvent the wheel here).

The number of changes that this one butterfly wing flap makes in this world—health care, law enforcement, and crime (and who knows what else...)—is pretty monumental. You don't need the Fae or a Council of Mages or anything to radically reshape the world. Yet it still is very recognizably our world.

ZACHARY QUINTO
Quinto really needs to do more audiobook narration—I'm not sure how he got attached to this series, but it's such a good thing that he did. He's really able to embody Valdez and bring the stories to life. I really enjoyed this performance, and look forward to more.

SO, WHAT DID I THINK ABOUT TRAVEL BY BULLET?
This was a blast—this world has always felt realized, but I felt more "at home" in it this time than I remember. I enjoyed this ride more than I remember enjoying the last one (not that I had any real problems with it). I don't know if those two sentences are all that related, and if so, which came first—I also don't think it matters.

This is a tight thriller—no wasted moments, but nothing's rushed, either. Just settle in and enjoy the ride.

I feel like I should have more to say, but I don't. All I can think to add at this point is that I want more of these, and hope that Audible and Scalzi provide them. Providing more soon would be a great bonus. show less

I've been waiting to read this audiobook until I got an Audible subscription again—it's an Audible exclusive, so I had to wait until I was ready to do a trial subscription to Audible Plus again in order to listen to it. I'd enjoyed the first two books in the series, so I'm glad that I got to catch-up/finish the series. (I can't determine if it's going to stop as a trilogy, or if there will be more books in the series.)

By the time I read this one, I had forgotten the details about what happened in books one and two, along with most of the characters. I remembered the basics of how Dispatching worked, and I remembered a few plot points from the other books. I remembered a couple of the characters in terms of jobs, but not their names. show more And yet? It was really easy to jump back into this one. I think that even readers completely new to the series would be able to jump in here without any confusion.

A lot of the plot points here are the kind where it helps to not think too much about how believable they are. They work well for a science fiction thriller, and that's what I was reading this book for (not for realism). Also, it helps to not be too squeamish when reading: there are several mentions of torture and killing (though nothing too graphic). All told, this is a fun and fast story, and I enjoyed reading it. It's not the kind of book I generally read (I usually avoid thrillers) but for me this series is perfect popcorn thriller reading. show less

In Travel by Bullet, the third futuristic crime thriller novella in the Dispatcher series, John Scalzi assumes that his readers are already familiar with his uncanny world in which homicide victims have a good chance of being resurrected in a safe place. Dispatcher Tony Valdez works in trauma wards and ORs, giving victims of accident or muffed surgery another chance. Travel by Bullet opens with him supervising the saving coup de grace for a fellow dispatcher who threw himself out of a speeding car. The details involve organized crime and a cryptocurrency scam. The Dispatcher stories are not as good as the Locked In series, but they are still fun for high-tech whodunit fans.

John Scalzi understands that many people read fiction largely for its entertainment value. He gets me. This latest novella featuring Tony Valdez, The Dispatcher, is yet another entertaining story that I dispatched in just a few days (see what I did there?). Tony lives in an odd, parallel universe where almost everyone that is killed comes back to life, restored to some previous level of health and in a safe place. Tony is also our first-person narrator and he's just likable enough (despite being essentially a paid assassin, a dispatcher) and snarky enough to keep us engaged as he works his way through the latest mystery that came his way.

This one begins with the arrival of another dispatcher at the emergency room of the hospital where show more Tony works. Mason's in bad shape and dying, having jumped out of a moving car and gotten run over, and would seem to be a good candidate for a dispatch. But he refuses the services of the on-duty dispatcher and asks for Tony. He just wants Tony to be with him, as the closest thing to a friend he believes he has. After Tony hears Mason's story, he whispers a suggestion to Mason and suddenly dispatches (kills) him. Mason disappears and we're off to the races to discover what secrets they shared and why Mason is on the run.

Scalzi keeps the story lively, deftly introducing a wide variety of characters from all manner of social strata and brings the story to a quick and amazingly satisfying resolution. Even though this is the third entry in the series, reading the previous stories in unnecessary. Recommended.

Disclosure: Thank you to Netgalley and Subterranean Press for providing a free copy of this book in return for my honest review. show less

Tony Valdez is a "dispatcher" who, in the strange, new world where people intentionally killed nearly always come back, very quickly, in the condition they were in a few hours before they were killed, kills people to save lives. He works in a hospital, and when injuries are too severe or surgery goes wrong, he can kill a person to reset them to the condition they were in a few hours earlier.

But the pandemic has changed things, and now dispatchers are called in, by families, in cases where it really won't help. When the patient has had serious organ damage for long enough that the "reset" of being killed and returning won't change anything. Tony and other dispatchers are feeling drained and frustrated by a new law that means every show more patient, or the family members making their legal decisions, is legally entitled to a dispatcher's "services" even in cases where the dispatcher knows it won't help. It's in the midst of a frustrating, depressing day at the hospital where Tony now works fulltime that he is summoned to the ER--which has its own dispatcher. Why is he being called in?

It's because a friend, or at least a colleague, of his Mason Schilling, was badly injured jumping out of a car on the highway. The ER has its own dispatcher, but Mason has said he won't agree to be dispatched till he has spoken to Tony. This isn't someone who is uncertain about the process and wants the reassurance of a more knowledgeable friend. He's a dispatcher himself, with looser ethics than Tony, which is why they aren't closer than they are. Mason has been involved in some of the shadier sides of the dispatching business. He doesn't want to be dispatched because the dispatched person returns not to where they were dispatched, but to the place they feel safest. Mason tells Tony there's no place he'll be safe. Tony whispers in his ear that he'll be safe in Tony's apartment, and he agrees to have the ER dispatcher dispatch him.

This is, of course, just the start of Tony's troubles. Mason has dragged him into the middle of a clash between tech billionaires, involving cryptocurrency, embezzlement, fraud, and some really seriously unethical uses of the dispatching process--including, yes, "travel by bullet," to flee the jurisdiction of police who want to talk to you. His police detective friend, Langdon, wants to know what he's keeping from her, doesn't believe he doesn't know where Mason is.

He's not lying about that. He is lying about not knowing where the crypto wallet Mason left behind is. Soon he's dodging tech billionaires, hired thugs, and possible unknown others, trying to protect Mason, whom the same people all want to get their hands on. It's a wild ride, and a good listen.

A minor detail that I really liked: Masks are just a routine fact of life for Tony and those around him. The changes the pandemic has made in our everyday lives are just there, taken for granted, in a story that isn't about the pandemic. It's not happening on some alternate timeline where covid never happened.

I really enjoyed this, and would like to see more in the series.

I bought this audiobook. show less

Definitely weaker than the previous ones.
One of the issues is that it doesn't add anything new to the world. We already know all about dispatching - possible use cases and corner cases - so there is nothing special about it at all. Dispatching takes a back seat to a global pandemic and cryptocurrencies.

It annoys me when writers feel they have to acknowledge current events. The pandemic had no real impact on the story besides dropping a couple of lines on the interaction between a disease and dispatching. And that was already handled in the first book. And with the crypto craze, I guess the story had to be about it. But then it doesn't handle the subject in an interesting way, it's just a contemporary MacGuffin.
Speaking of which, show more mentioning a trope in the book and then still playing it straight is weird. It's like noticing a puddle and then stepping in it. Why do you have to say out loud that you're aware of puddle? There is no significance in that except to say "I know this looks lazy. That's because it actually is lazy".

In the end, it's a mediocre techno-thriller that just happens to be set in the Dispatcher universe. show less