Head On

"As much as Scalzi has the scientific creativity of a Michael Crichton, he also has the procedural chops of a Stephen J. Canell 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. OTHER TOR BOOKS BY JOHN SCALZI Agent to the Stars The Android's Dream Fuzzy Nation Redshirts Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008 The Kaiju Preservation Society Starter Villain When the Moon Hits Your Eye Monsters of Ohio THE OLD MAN'S WAR NOVELS Old Man's War The Ghost Brigades The Last Colony Zoë's Tale The Human Division The End of All Things The Shattering Peace THE LOCK IN SERIES Lock In Unlocked THE INTERDEPENDENCY SEQUENCE The Collapsing Empire The Consuming Fire The Last Emperox EDITED BY JOHN SCALZI Metatropolis At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

John Scalzi