The Body Scout

If I had to write the logline of this book, I would say it’s like Robert Coover writing Blade Runner. Our narrator is a body scout, whose job is to look for potential talent for a cyborg baseball league. It’s cyborg in the sense of of body modification run amok. He can’t play himself because of certain bans, but he’s still in the biz. He’s on a call when he finds out that one of the stars of the league has been found dead, seemingly murdered. We learn that this player is a de facto stepbrother for our narrator, who grew up in the star’s house, having been adopted by his abuela when they were teens. So he begins to poke around trying to figure out what has happened. In the early stages of his investigations, he’s approached by another scout who puts him in touch with the head of the Monsanto Mets, the team that JJ, the dead star played for. He gets conscripted into solving the mystery on their dime and timeline and the novel goes from there. It’s a kind of cyberpunk novel by way of a lot more irony, and it’s playing in the field of the noir in its way too. I am not sure how convinced I am by the cybernetics stuff, but the novel itself is interesting, and more so than being like William Gibson and similar writers, it bends more to the Neal Stephenson and David Cronenberg crowds. The pacing is solid, the prose is good, and the story is relatively pumping and compelling.