Head on by John Scalzi

Head on by John Scalzi

"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.

The 2006 John W. Campbell Award went to John Scalzi. He won the Campbell Award for Outstanding New Writer, and his debut novel, Old Man's War, was a Hugo Award finalist for science fiction. The Ghost Brigades, The Android's Dream, and The Last Colony are among his other works. He has received the Hugo Award, the Romantic Times Critics Choice Award for science fiction, the Seiun, the Kurd Lasswitz, and the Geffen awards, among others. His blog, Whatever, is one of the most popular in current science fiction.

Scalzi was born and reared in California and attended the University of Chicago. He and his wife and daughter live in southern Ohio.