Imagine Zachary Quinto, known as nuSpock or “that quiet guy in Margin Call who tells Jeremy Irons the bad news”, doing an impression of Heath Ledger’s Joker. Got it? Okay, good, because that was my favorite part of this novella. Imagine that one day, for no reason at all, people who are murdered by others have a 999/100 chance of suddenly appearing back at home, naked and in the same physical state they were twelve hours before. If they die of natural causes (falling off a cliff), they stay dead. But if they were pushed off a cliff, then poof! They’re back, and they have serious questions for their wife who just pushed them. In this world, a new profession has been created; the Dispatcher, or someone who attends to those who are are mortally injured and kills them with a special tool so that they are technically murdered and can poof back to bed. This is helpful in surgeries and Hollywood stunt sets. Our main character Tony Valdez is such a dispatcher, but one of his coworkers has just disappeared and the police Have Questions. That’s the story of The Dispatcher, which has an interesting premise that is never explained, just developed via dialogue. It’s a straightforward mystery that ends tidily, and the story itself rises and falls on the strength of its narrator. I tried this book because of the mix of author and narrator — I like Quinto’s Spock and was curious as to what kind of narrator he’d make. Another Star Trek alum, Wil Wheaton, is awesome at it. Quinto’s quality is more variable. His channeling of Heath Ledger’s Joker for one of the nefarious business types was hilarious and made the book for me all by itself, but another of the voices (a female detective) is much weaker, both in terms of how enjoyable it is to listen to (not in the least) and how much sense it makes: the character sounds like a vaguely southern woman instead of one born in Chicago. Granted, doing voice impressions for the opposite sex is a challenge regardless, as it drifts so easily into farce, but I’ve never listened to Wil Wheaton or Jim Dale doing a female character and thought “This sounds weird”. (Then again, I don’t think Wheaton ever did distinct voices for characters like Art3mis, so perhaps the comparison is unfair.) With this work, the Tony-cop conversations were all grating and tedious. That’s unfortunate given that she’s the book’s secondary character. This novella has a sequel, Murder by Other Means, which I will check out to experience more of Quinto’s range, and perhaps see if Scalzi ever explains the premise.