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.