In the strange near-future world of John Scalzi's novella The Dispatcher, people who are murdered get a second chance. Their bodies disappear and reappear naked, at home, in bed. . . . Weird, right? Once people figured out this pattern--which Scalzi doesn't bother explaining--the role of the dispatcher was created. The protagonist of The Dispatcher is a dispatcher, whose job is to be present during surgery (and maybe other times of peril) so that when it looks like someone is about to die naturally, he can kill them, so that they get another chance to live.
I know, it sounds absurd, and it is. Valdez's fellow dispatcher goes missing, and he teams up with a cop to investigate the disappearance. He gets into the shady world of unofficial dispatching and, to his surprise, gets dispatched himself. It's a gritty whodunit set against the backdrop of this unlikely world of dispatching.
On the one hand, I wasn't too interested in the elusive mystery. On the other hand, the resolution wasn't what I might have anticipated. On the one hand, this in an ok but not great story. On the other hand, it's pretty short, so you won't feel like you have wasted a ton of time for a mediocre story.
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