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  • Travel by Bullet

  • The Dispatcher, Book 3
  • Written by: John Scalzi
  • Narrated by: Zachary Quinto
  • Length: 3 hrs and 43 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (299 ratings)

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Travel by Bullet

Written by: John Scalzi
Narrated by: Zachary Quinto
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Publisher's Summary

The Audible and New York Times best-selling Dispatcher series returns with a brand-new mystery, performed by Zachary Quinto.

The world has changed. Now, when someone is murdered, they almost always come back to life—and there are professionals, called “dispatchers”, who kill in order to save lives, to give those near the end a second chance. Tony Valdez is a dispatcher, and he has never been busier. 

But for as much as the world has changed, some things have stayed the same. Greed, corruption, and avarice are still in full swing. When Tony is called to a Chicago emergency room by an old friend and fellow dispatcher, he is suddenly and unwillingly thrown into a whirlpool of schemes and plots involving billions of dollars, with vast caches of wealth ranging from real estate to cryptocurrency up for grabs. 

All Tony wants to do is keep his friend safe. But it’s hard to do when friends keep secrets, enemies offer seductive deals, and nothing is ever what it seems. The world has changed...but the stakes are still life and death.

©2022 John Scalzi (P)2022 Audible Originals, LLC.

What listeners say about Travel by Bullet

Average Customer Ratings
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Best entry in the series yet!

I enjoyed the first two Dispatcher entires and REALLY ENJOYED this one. Very entertaining and fast paced. Great cast of characters, some familiar some new. Hope there is another one at some point!

1 person found this helpful

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Just a fun listen

The plot is entertaining and I really enjoy the author's writing style.
I'd love another in the series.

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Great instalment

Great edition to the trilogy and as always added a strong story with mysticism and action.

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Love it

Listened to it multiple times. Love the story, characters, twists. Loved it all. The person reading it did an amazing job too.

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Fun from start to end…

…and Zachary Q is great. A real pro. I recommend this whole series, and would love to see it as a miniseries.

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Clever, funny, great performance

Zachary Quinto's voice acting could make a grocery list absorbing - fortunately, the story is great so he doesn't have to. If you liked the first two, this one is just as good!

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Awesome Series

I was so excited to see that there was a third book! This one did not disappoint. All three books in this series were great!

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Love This Series!

I thought this was another good installment in this series and genuinely hope there are more to come. I love the layers that always accompany this, the grit that is the detective aspects, and the relationships we get to see stoked and flourish.

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favorite so far

This is my favorite it of this series so far. It's there going to be a fourth?

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Entertaiing

Fast paced and entertaining though I preferred the first two better. All the same, hoping that there is a book 4.

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  • Sharon
  • 2022-09-02

The best Dispatcher story yet ....

Thank you, John Scalzi, for the absolute best rant I have ever heard about the damage that can be done by people who control so much wealth, so much money that they use it like a weapon, and putting it in a story that could be coming out of today's news. Live long and prosper, John Scalzi.



12 people found this helpful

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  • Andy Yi
  • 2022-09-01

Worthy No. 3 Installment in the Dispatcher series

Just as much as I listen to this series to hear Zachary Quinto read Tony, its the choice amalgamation of Quinto, Scalzi and Tunney that makes the Tunney scion such an awesome delight to encounter in the series, because like Batman, Tunney knows what’s about to happen and has everyone playing to his tune. Excellent addition to an awesome series, thanks John Scalzi for another binge-worth episode!!! ^____^

6 people found this helpful

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  • Bill in CT
  • 2022-09-02

Another Fine Entry in the Dispatcher Series

This was another good Dispatcher story. if you liked the first two, you'll definitely like this one. Zachary Quinto's performance was as good as before, but the production values were uneven, thus the four stars. I loved how Scalzi used Hitchcock's McGuffin trope for the object that everybody was scrambling to get, very much in the spirit of old time noir. The real McGuffin, of course, is the whole Dispatch device. All of these stories are who-dun-its that Philip Marlowe would be proud of.

4 people found this helpful

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  • Mark Soukup
  • 2022-09-05

Awesome

Each one of this series is getting better and better
Hope they continue on
Very unique

3 people found this helpful

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  • CTRL_FU
  • 2022-09-02

The Dispatcher series dispatches more greatness

The Dispatcher series has yet to disappoint and Zachary Quinto delivers the perfect voice for these excellent Scalzi shorts.

3 people found this helpful

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  • naeelah
  • 2023-03-18

Rewarding payoff from first 2.books.

This is easily the best of the Dispatcher series, so far. Also, the weirdly hollow audio quality of the first 2 has been fixed.

I enjoyed the first 2 books in the series, but they're almost exposition. The 1st book establishes essential world building. The 2nd frames a mystery around one of the major outstanding metaphysical questions of the first book: how and where does this unexplained force that brings people back to life draw the line between murder and dying from a situation you were forced into?

This book, the 3rd, has all of the big questions out of the way and just cracks on with an engaging and timely buddy cop story. It's about asshole billionaires, cryptocurrency schemes, and the importance of changing your PIN. I appreciate that the pandemic features as a part of the universe, but isn't a central issue.

As always, Quinto gives a great reading. He's clearly comfortable with all of these characters and easily distinguishes the cast in his performance.

Definitely recommended if you like classic cop/PI type mysteries and want a fresh world to dip into. The books are written so that they can stand alone, but I think you'll be better rewarded if you take them in order.

1 person found this helpful

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  • Michael Graham
  • 2023-02-10

Diminishing Returns

I have listened to each book in The Dispatcher series. I loved the first one. The second one was pretty good. This one was just boring. The last 20 minutes is nothing but exposition, which tells me the rest of the writing was lazy. There are ways to tell a complete story without making the last 10% of your book being, "so this is all the important stuff that was happening while I was talking about ice cream flavors and my opinion on tipping etiquette." Also, as more books come out, the heavier political tint these books have. The central theme of this book is that rich people are bad, exploit poor people, are greedy, and don't need money. Agree with it or not, that's the whole book.

1 person found this helpful

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    2 out of 5 stars
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  • Jean
  • 2022-11-18

Clumsy and insipid writing; lackluster narration; poor editing

I can’t quite bring myself to give this only a single star, since I listened to the end. I’ve been extremely sick this week, however, which may have something to do with my patience in that regard. However, I will say that this was absolutely the worst book that I’ve listened to on Audible.

The world-building rests on a completely unexplained and generally unexplored supernatural phenomena. The sole clever insight on the subject is in the title, and repeated one too many times in the text.

The combination of impermanent death and the super-rich behaving badly is vaguely reminiscent of Richard Morgan’s far superior Altered Carbon series. Did I say “super rich?” I must’ve meant “billionaires,” since that word is repeated so many times in this book that one wonders if the author had a bet going with his copy-editor. That would assume that there was a copy-editor involved, of course, and given the extreme clumsiness of some of the writing, such is not necessarily a given.

There are a number of implausible plot devices, which I won’t go into to avoid spoiling any (small) pleasure this book may offer to other readers. I found it relatively easy to suspend my disbelief in support of the fantasy premise of a partial repeal of the rules of death. For the multiple examples of characters simply not acting or speaking like humans, however, my disbelief was more stubborn. Various insipid exchanges aside, how many times would actual humans say the complete phrase “crypto wallet” to each other, outside of an adult education class on bitcoin?

Enough on the writing. All of that was from memory, and I have no inclination to listen again for more examples.

Zachary Quinto is a fine actor, and I’ve enjoyed many of his on-screen performances. I did not enjoy his reading of this book. His overly flat affect simply didn’t give the story, which as detailed above was already quite wanting, any legs. He didn’t achieve significant differentiation between the characters’ voices, his accents wavered, and in general he seemed like he could have used a nice, strong double latte. Or maybe a triple.

Adding insult to injury, even the audio recording is poor. There are a large number of punch-in edits which were clearly recorded at a separate time and without regard to timbral or even volume matching, resulting in jarring transitions where there was no transition in the story. Very distracting. We’re no longer working with reel-to-reel recorders; there are plug-ins and other editing tools that could have gone a long way towards solving these problems. Look up Paul Frindle, for example. That the problems remain unaddressed in the final product simply seems shoddy.

Ok, rant done. Thanks for reading. Any typos I hereby blame on my iPhone.

1 person found this helpful

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  • Jon
  • 2022-11-02

Took a chance

Enjoyed the program. Don’t usually just click on things that show up. Liked the new to me twist implied by the title.

1 person found this helpful

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    1 out of 5 stars
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  • Suspect
  • 2022-11-01

Great Story, Unbearably Bad Audio Quality

This great story deserves a 1-star rating, because it’s an AUDIObook with terrible sound quality. Audiobooks should not receive rave reviews if they’re essentially unlistenable. The narrator is actually very good, I think.

1 person found this helpful

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  • Anonymous User
  • 2023-01-01

Great stories

The triptic is really good and the reader is clear and enjoyable.
I highly recommend it.

1 person found this helpful