Tony Valdez is a dispatcher. In a world where people who die of natural causes stay dead, but people who are killed by others magically appear back in bed, his job is to intercede when people are dying from accidents and not-immediately-fatal stabbings and do the dirty on them, so they’ll technically have been murdered and poof back to bed. Most of the time. One time out of a thousand, the process — which no one understands, which just started happening one day — fails. In The Dispatcher, we saw what happened to one of Tony’s dispatching friends when one of his jobs went awry, and as Tony was assisting the cops with the case, he ran into some shady business types whose schemes he’s more involved with now, thanks in part due to a lack of legit work. Here, he’s an innocent bystander caught in a bank robbery, who is suspected of involvement by the authorities. Quinto gets a larger cast of characters to play with here, and while listening to Quinto doing a gruff bartender with a deep bass voice isn’t quite as funny as his Heath Leader Joker, it’s still a fun change from his own speaking voice, which is soft and high. There’s a little more world-building here, as we see illicit ways people put the weird saved-by-murder mechanic to work, in holding gladiatorial games or using it for return trips home — as well as to how occupations that used to depend on murder as a threat are now having to get imaginative to the point of diabolic. It’s an enjoyable enough way to spend three hours while one is doing something like driving or playing a PC game. There’s a third part of this story, which I’ll probably try during this month.

Non-audio SF titles will appear this month, I promise.