I really liked this... mostly because I found the concept unique, or at least unique to me.

I found Scalzi through The Dispacher, which was an Audible freebee at some point. I like his voice. That said, my biggest issue with this novel is the quantity of exposition through dialog. Granted, there is a lot to explain in this world, but generally people don't talk like this. They think like this.

I was a bit worried about reading a novel about a pandemic during the current pandemic and quickly relieved to find out that the plot really doesn't revolve around the hisotry of Haden's syndrome. The end of the version I listened to had an audio drama of the history of the disease, but by the time I got to it, I was curious, so I enjoyed it. Some of the paralells between our current situation and Scalzi's fictional history are a bit striking though, particularly about the frustration and misinformation caused by scientific process of learning about a new virus.

As characters Chris Shane and Leslie Vann are engaging and reasonably developed. I'm interested to learn more in Head On. The mystery is unusual and a bit Holmesian in that by eliminating all of the possibilities, the only options become the impossible, turning the story to figure out how the impossible is possible.