Head On
2018
- epidemics
- virtual reality
- sports stories
- virus diseases
- fiction
- fiction, crime
- fiction, mystery & detective, police procedural
- fiction, science fiction, general
- fiction / science fiction / action & adventure
- fiction / thrillers / crime
The story
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.
What it’s like
Brisk, sardonic and fast-talking, with the wry, conversational voice of a crime caper written for readers who enjoy a joke in every scene. The sensory world is built from sports-arena noise: roaring crowds, the clank of hammers on armour, and the uncanny stillness of threep bodies that look like polished machines when their pilots are elsewhere. Chapters move quickly, with short cuts between locker-room bickering, press chatter and procedural legwork, so it reads like a mid-season sports broadcast crossed with a police file. Its mood is brash, bantering and low-dread, with a gallows humour that keeps the violence at arm's length: it is brutal on the field, but the bodies are robotic and nobody truly bleeds, so the stakes feel more like fraud and greed than real harm. Expect a murder mystery where the bloodshed is mechanical and the sharpest moments are the verbal ones. Good for a long-haul flight, a playful weekend read, or fans of fast crime fiction who like a sports spectacle. Not gentle in tone, though far from grisly.
More books like Head On
Closest in mood, pacing and theme. Tell us why you loved Head Onand we’ll explain which ones fit you.
