Head On

By John Scalzi

Book Overview

"As much as Scalzi has the scientific creativity of a Michael Crichton, he also has the procedural chops of a Stephen J. Cannell to craft a whodunit with buddy-cop charm and suspects aplenty--most of them in someone else's body." --USA Today

John Scalzi returns with Head On, the standalone follow-up to the New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed Lock In. Chilling near-future SF with the thrills of a gritty cop procedural, Head On brings Scalzi's trademark snappy dialogue and technological speculation to the future world of sports.

Hilketa is a frenetic and violent pastime where players attack each other with swords and hammers. The main goal of the game: obtain your opponent's head and carry it through the goalposts. With flesh and bone bodies, a sport like this would be impossible. But all the players are "threeps," robot-like bodies controlled by people with Haden's Syndrome, so anything goes. No one gets hurt, but the brutality is real and the crowds love it.

Until a star athlete drops dead on the playing field.

Is it an accident or murder? FBI Agents and Haden-related crime investigators, Chris Shane and Leslie Vann, are called in to uncover the truth--and in doing so travel to the darker side of the fast-growing sport of Hilketa, where fortunes are made or lost, and where players and owners do whatever it takes to win, on and off the field.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0765388936
• ISBN13: 9780765388933
• Release Date: March 2019
• Publisher: Tor Books
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.51 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 4.3" x 7.5"

Customer Reviews

Scalzi Knocks it out of the park, AGAIN

John Scalzi has a grasp on story telling with humor that keep you wanting to turn the next page no matter what sad thing may have just happened, or which twist of narrative went that way you really did not expect.