The Body Scout

by Lincoln Michel

In this “timeless and original” sci-fi thriller ( New York Times ), a hardboiled baseball scout must solve the murder of his brother in a world transformed by body modification, perfect for readers of William Gibson and Max Barry.

An  Esquire  Pick for the Top 50 Sci-Fi Books of All Time

A New York Times Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novel of 2021

"A breathlessly paced techno-thriller characterized by stunning, spiky worldbuilding." —   Esquire In the future you can have any body you want—as long as you can afford it. But in a New York ravaged by climate change and repeat pandemics, Kobo is barely scraping by. He scouts the latest in gene-edited talent for Big Pharma-owned baseball teams, but his own cybernetics are a decade out of date and twin sister loan sharks are banging down his door. Things couldn't get much worse. Then his brother—Monsanto Mets slugger J.J. Zunz—is murdered at home plate. Determined to find the killer, Kobo plunges into a world of genetically modified CEOs, philosophical Neanderthals, and back-alley body modification, only to quickly find he's in a game far bigger and more corrupt than he imagined. To keep himself together while the world is falling apart, he'll have to navigate a time where both body and soul are sold to the highest bidder. Diamond-sharp and savagely wry, The Body Scout is a timely science fiction thriller debut set in an all-too-possible future. "I devoured it." —Jonathan Lethem "Completely weird and still completely real. Delightful—I couldn't put it down."—Shea Serrano

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Cyberpunk, Mystery, Dystopia, Baseball, Thriller

368 pages, Hardcover

First published September 21, 2021

About the author

Lincoln Michel is the author of the story collection Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press) and the novel The Body Scout (Orbit), which was named one of the 10 Best Science Fiction Books of 2021 by The New York Times and one of the 75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time by Esquire.

His short fiction appears in The Paris Review, Granta, Lightspeed, McSweeney’s, NOON, Pushcart Prize anthology, and elsewhere. His essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, The Guardian, and elsewhere.

He writes the newsletter Counter Craft and his next novel, My Metallic Realms, will be published by Atria in 2025.

Reviews

[Roxane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Michel is a great writer and thinker and I loved the premise of this novel. Very gritty. Lots of worldbuilding, maybe too much, but still it’s clear the author knows this world and has thought it through. Very strong characters—the central people were the best part of the novel. I wanted more of a story. The central mystery here isn’t that compelling. Probably because I don’t care about baseball. There are some interesting twists toward the end but there also strange inconsistencies. In the last chapter the narrator says there are no buildings in town more than 12 feet high. A few pages later, there are no buildings in town more than two feet high. Is it two different towns? A consistency error? Anyway. If you like noir novels but set in the future or if you love baseball and dystopia this is well worth your time. There is some really smart thinking throughout. And wit.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

I RECEIVED MY DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

"We build better livers, and someone concocts stronger booze. We get sun treatments, then our chemicals burn up the ozone even more. Cure one disease, and another pops up. The pitcher juices up his throw, and the batter juices up his swing. On and on it goes."
–and–
“We’re all trapped in these forms, aren’t we? Our minds get poured into them without anyone even asking us. We grow and live in them, and yet in many ways they are as incomprehensible to us as the cosmos.”
–and–
"We've got 'em all. Mammoth burgers, teriyaki tyrannosaurs wings, saber-toothed gyro platters. Those cocksuckers thought they could avoid being eaten by going extinct. Bunch of buffoons. Didn't count on human ingenuity. We can eat anything these days. Eat the past, present or future."

The flavor of the writing is right there...wry, world-weary, ever so slightly facetious...and if that ain't your jam, baby, move along. Author Michel, whose story collection Upright Beasts earned praise from me, fails to shock me with his writing and planning chops. It's very clear why he offers writing advice for a living.

What would happen if Gattaca and Moneyball had a bastard love-child? This book. From the off, I loved the choices Author Michel made. Baseball is my only organized sport love. Having the Mets (my team since the 1969 Miracle Mets defeated the BodyMore Inc....I mean Baltimore!...Orioles in the seventh game of the World Series) owned by Monsanto was, while revolting, not entirely unthinkable. Choosing baseball for the body-modding corporate shills to play made perfect sense because there's so much more to work with in the prowess-enhancement department. Baseball players are required to specialize in this day and age...don't get me started about the designated-hitter rule!...and yet by the very nature of the game there is a constellation of skills they still need to possess to some degree, like running and fielding the ball. The development of modifying tech, driven by the need/want of the Big Pharma owners, gets laid right at present-day capitalism's (and its political stooge class's) door, as the present-day pandemic accelerated the mad dash for corporate ownership of everything into sports. It's not at all unlikely, given that corporations own teams in Japan....

But the fact that the world Kobo Zunz lives in, the one that allows him to modify his body to an absurd degree despite having become a talent scout thus no longer playing baseball, is chock-a-block with delightfully pointed choices embodied in other characters: Dolores ("sorrows" or "pains") is Kobo's friend/kinda-ex, a Deaf person who elected not to restore her hearing but to enhance her sight (GoogleGlasses-esque modifications to one eye that present speech translated into ASL); Natasha the Neanderthal, the Big Pharma enforcing muscle and that's not a nickname but a descriptive label as she's of the genetically engineered re-introduced Neanderthals; Lila, the Angry Young Girl who, like Greta Thunberg, is outraged into incandescence at the gigantic mess her elders are leaving for her to clean up. I love that, when Kobo the expert at foreseeing trends in body modification (always ask an addict to get an accurate vision of the addiction's course) is summoned to solve the gruesome and very public murder of his adopted brother, Monsanto Mets batting (aka "slugging") star JJ Zunz, it's by a manager whose only name is "the Mouth." Ha! Kobo's debts incurred in body modding will be paid in full...if he pins the very public, obviously message-sending murder on a particular rival team. That will get the scary, violent loansharks who have been funding his biomechanical enhancement addiction, Brenda and Wanda, off his terrifying-nightmares list.

So what am I saying about this read? Much delighted me, mentioned above. There are things that didn't delight me near so much. The length of the story, for example, would support more exploration of side characters who got little (JJ's mother, who adopted Kobo). But in all honesty I'd've been much happier if some of the amazing ideas and snarky asides had been held in RAM for a sequel, leaving a fizzier and more propulsive through-line. It's not like it's a slow read, or wasn't for me; it's just densely packed with irresistible shiny baubles and it could've been told in less time and at a more spanking pace. I presume this is not the start of a series because the publishers would've trumpeted that fact if it had been. If Author Michel chooses to make it into a series, which I really hope he will, quite a lot of the underexplored material will be very expandable.

What isn't expandable is the ending. A very weird change of tone takes place as we're coming in for our landing. It becomes...sweet. Kind of sentimental. This felt so very wrong to me, like Philip Marlowe got a hit of some opiods and turned into Ted Lasso.

What I will say is that you're going to love The Body Scout if you loved George Alec Effinger's Marîd Audran books, or the early William Gibson. I did; I do; and all cavils aside, I'd encourage any baseball fans, bleak/noir fiction lovers, and anti-capitalists to hop on board. A few bumps on the journey shouldn't detract from the way-cool scenery.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Body Scout is a scifi/noir tale following Kobo,who is a former baseball player turned scout investigating the murder of his best friend JJ Sunz, who dies suddenly in the middle of a game.

This book was a very fun read with great world building and suspense. This to me is more plot driven, but the characters are fleshed out well enough to get a good sense of who they are. The pacing is excellent and leaves the reader wanting to see what happens next. The baseball element of the story is well done as well. There's a whole lot of baseball here, so if that's not your thing, it may turn you off of the story. If you enjoy a good gritty scifi book and baseball, then this is for you!

Thank you to OrbitBooks, author Lincoln Michel, and NetGalley for gifting me a digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

[Ray Nessly · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Venom was quick, capitalism killed you nice and slow. Then sent you a bill.”
--Lincoln Michel, The Body Scout


(Image: The Future According to Baseball, link to source is at end of review)


The Body Scout is a nifty tale about athletes of the future. Chemically enhanced? Of course. But now to the max. Plus, loads of biomechanical limbs and organs, pushing these baseball players as close as you can get to the line between robots and humans. Moreover, some have enhancements inspired by other species. p 9: “Dash was the Mets’ leadoff hitter and was built like a kangaroo. The Mets lab team had her on a strict lower-leg regimen that had her halfway to first base the moment her bat cracked the ball.”
Also ratcheted up several notches, obviously, is the heavy hand of corporations. Dig these team names: Monsanto Mets. ChicagoBioWhite Mice. California Human Potential Growth Corp Dodgers …

It’s a grim, eco-ravaged future (aren’t they all?), in which smog floated “across America like a dirty tongue licking the land,” and wildlife is replaced with its opposite: artificial life, the bio corporations churning out new models daily for commercial purposes.

p 67, an Amazon wet dream: “A drone shaped like a pelican fell out of the sky, my purchases in its pouch. The drone was covered in plastic flesh and feathers, but it was designed with Disney in mind. Gigantic eyes and a smile carved into the bright yellow beak. It was caught in some grotesque tug-of-war between machine, flesh, and cartoon.”

A sushi joint offers synthetic Komodo dragon rolls, and delivers sashimi by robotic gulls.
p. 8 “Between us were the usual assortment of customers rich enough to spend a month’s rent on chunks of petri dish tuna. You could tell how wealthy they were by looking at them. Idle rich venturing out from their cloud condos to show off their latest enhancements. Investment bankers built like linebackers. A pair of socialites clinking martini glasses, one elongated with curved bones like giant noodles and the other spilling over the seat with curved bones like giant noodles and the other spilling over the seat with reinforced curves.”

Not a great time to be alive, one supposes. But we finally (!) get flying cars. And teams with all sexes. Yea!
And despite the ugliness of future baseball, there’s something sweet and reassuring about it as well. pp224 & 343: “The announcers rattled on in the hallway speakers, expounding like experts on a game that hadn’t even started yet. I smiled. It was comforting how America’s pastime was frozen in time.” “Despite everything, I still loved the game. The weirdness of its rules, the uniforms, and the crack of the bat amplified through the stadium’s speakers. It felt timeless. Players would come and go. Teams would move cities. Leagues would fold. But the game, like some stubborn dinosaur dragging its thick tail into the future, would remain.” A great paragraph, especially that last sentence.

I haven’t yet read Michel’s lauded short story collections. This is his first novel, and obviously he’s a terrific, imaginative writer. I welcomed the satirical humor that lightens things up quite a bit. As the plot thickens --or as I prefer to say, the thick plottens TM --this novel develops into a crime story, incorporating sci-fi, satirical social commentary with elements of noir and even some hard-boiled dialogue sounding like the literary partner firm of Hammett, Chandler & Vonnegut:
p 9 “She had thick arms and a brow you could have balanced a champagne glass on. [The man’s features] were all smoothed out. You could have mistaken him for a human-sized bar of soap that had been used a few too many times.” A surprise re the murder appears about 2/3 through. I didn’t see it coming. I rarely do.

For me, the crime story did seem repetitive. YMMV. Still a solid 4 stars. A contender for a second read someday.

Additional quotes
p 139: “Dr. Setek slithered out. His upper half was screwed into a cybernetic tail somewhere between a snake’s tail and a gigantic tongue. He bobbed up and down, moving toward us. His red hair erupted from his skull like a forest fire. His long green tie swayed back and forth as he licked his way across the plastic floor.”

p 350 The paragraph w keywords “life begins at duplication.”

Above image (not visible on app) is from The Future of Baseball : https://sabr.org/journal/article/intr...

[Mogsy · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 of 5 stars at The BiblioSanctum https://bibliosanctum.com/2021/11/08/...

I’m always trying to read more cyberpunk, which can be a problem sometimes because the genre doesn’t always agree with me. Most of what we think of as more traditional cyberpunk tends to on the darker side and too bleak for my tastes, or the technological aspects might be far too complex and overwhelming for me to handle. So you can imagine what a pleasant surprise it was when I came across Lincoln Michel’s The Body Scout, and found a perfect balance of cyberpunk noir, futuristic sci-fi, and easy, wonderful readability.

As you’d expect, the world of The Body Scout is one where its citizens prize cybernetics and other body modifications, and the use of such enhancements has changed virtually every aspect of human life, including sports. Our protagonist Kobo is a talent scout for the professional baseball league, now controlled by the pharmaceutical companies, making his living traveling around the world recruiting new people for his bosses and hunting for the latest mods to improve performance. A former bionic athlete himself, Kobo used to play for the now defunct Cyber League but is now strapped with huge amounts of debt while trying to make ends meet in a cutthroat industry.

Meanwhile though, his best friend and adoptive brother Zunz is making a name for himself as a rising star playing professionally for the Monsanta Mets, and Kobo couldn’t be prouder and happier for him. But then one day, in the middle of a playoff game in front of millions watching, Zunz suddenly drops dead on the field. Everyone is calling it a tragic accident, pointing to either a mysterious illness or some other issue related to his mods. However, Kobo isn’t buying it. He suspects it may be murder, and the plot thickens as he is next hired by the owner of the Monsanto Mets to investigate Zunz’s death, with the promise of a large reward if he can somehow implicate the team’s rivals. Seizing this opportunity to seek answers to his own questions, Kobo begins his twisted journey into the dark and unforgiving world of sports and corporate politics where everyone has a stake.

First of all, I was pretty impressed that The Body Scout is a debut. This novel was very well put together, with intriguing characters and a compulsive storyline. The premise behind the mystery plot was established fairly early, which proved to be an excellent decision by the author as the bombshell of Zunz’s death pretty much set the tone and pace for the rest of the book, which was quick and punchy. Thing is, I couldn’t even give a crap about baseball, yet I was drawn completely into this story which says a lot about Michel’s writing. For one, it was fascinating the way cybernetics and enhancements were married into the world of sports, and I found all those ideas refreshing and unique in spite of their esoteric nature.

Plus, everyone knows I love a good whodunit. Of course, cyberpunk and crime noir often go hand in hand, but also it takes something special to create an engaging mystery, and The Body Scout has it. Nothing is what it seems, and as we follow Kobo into his strange and unfamiliar world, I was glad that the narrative kept us focused on the key elements while others may have been tempted to go offtrack exploring other facets of the world. God knows there were enough distractions with the near-future setting, the population’s obsession with the staggering variety of technological enhancements, or even all that potential material when it came to baseball. Oh yeah, and there were Neanderthals, which have been brought back through cloning. The point is though, Michel always brought the attention back to what was important—our protagonist’s motivation to find who killed his beloved friend and brother.

I think it was this point that brought something very personal and relatable to the mix. It’s something a lot of cyberpunk books lack, I find, which is this nice warm message about found families and powerful friendships. Sure, things didn’t ultimately turn out too well for our protagonist and his brother, but Kobo’s reactions went on to make him extremely sympathetic to me. Flashbacks to his childhood, brief as they were, of playing with Zunz in the bleak spaces beneath the flooded city of New York were some of my favorites because they somehow made the baseball star’s death even more egregious and horrifying. After all, someone had robbed that boy in his memories of his big dream, and Kobo isn’t going to rest until he finds out why. His long lists of flaws aside, I definitely liked him initially because of his devotion and tenacity, and eventually, it became more about the way the investigation changes him.

So, if you’re hankering for something cyberpunky that’s also accessible and won’t overwhelm you too much with bleakness and sci-fi lingo, look no further—The Body Scout is what you need. While I can see how the heavy focus on baseball might be off-putting to some, I think the story’s unique premise is what will come out on top, not to mention the plot moves so fast you probably won’t even notice. Overall, simply a brilliant and enjoyable debut from Lincoln Michel, with strong characterization and superb storytelling.

[Bandit · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was craving a science fiction novel to balance my reading diet. This one seemed intriguing, but there was…baseball. Crap. Even for someone like me who doesn’t care for competitive sports, baseball is still at the bottom of every list. Just a weird, weird, inexplicably popular game. So much so that it has been dragged all the way into the future, albeit somewhat tweaked.
Actually the game itself hasn’t changed much, the players have. Much like the rest of the world in this disturbingly imaginative future, (almost) everyone has gone mad for body modifications and alterations. The tech has finally gotten to the place where the original body plan is a mere suggestion and people are suping themselves up and tweaking themselves out as much as they can, imagination and money being the only limits. And, of course, for athletes who have been enhancing themselves up for ages anyway, this is positively de rigueur. So that Kobo, our protagonist and self improvement junkie, isn’t really surprised when his adopted brother, a professional baseball player, calls him up out of the blue seemingly all messed up. But he is surprised when this brother turns up dead. And upset. Which, along with the promise of much needed funds, is a sufficient motivation for Kobo to investigate this murder when he is hired to do so by the league’s owner.
So this is a murder investigation thriller. Done by an ambitious amateur. In a world where the truth much like people is almost infinitely malleable. And for all the technological and scientific advantages that have been made, some fundamental facts about people, greed, ambition, arrogance, etc. remain same as they ever were.
What Kobo stumbles into is essentially the next step in the evolution or devolution of the species, a journey as dangerous and terrifying for him as it is exciting for the readers.
This futuristic (potentially cyberpunk?) adventure was a pretty fun read and a most impressive debut for the author. Dynamic pacing, awesome world building and all around good writing, especially when it comes to characters, who came out as complex psychologically as they are biotechnologically. Granted, for me it was all about genetics gone wild and not at all about baseball, but overall surprisingly readable for a sportscentric story. So, if like me, you don’t care about grown men in silly outfits chasing a ball in accordance to seemingly arbitrary rules for insane amounts of money, you can still enjoy this book. I’d imagine most science fiction fans would. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

This and more at https://advancetheplot.weebly.com/

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Nothing alive can be fully controlled."
—p.207

Yeah, okay. The Body Scout, the debut novel from Lincoln Michel, is a perfectly serviceable corporate dystopia—I liked it, all right—but I'm not sure there much that's new here. Science fiction's been playing with this sort of trope since at least the 1950s, after all, when The Space Merchants took us to the logical endpoint of our lust for conspicuous consumption and planned obsolescence, and when Cyril M. Kornbluth wrote about "The Marching Morons" in their dumbed-down, slogan-drenched future. For a somewhat more modern example, think of Max Barry's Jennifer Government. I'm sure you can think of others.

In The Body Scout, our viewpoint character is the eponymous body scout, a nice guy named Kobo who works for a New York baseball team currently known as the Monsanto Mets (a good touch, that—it's entirely plausible that biotechnology giants would get into sports enhancements). His main job isn't scouting out players, though—as the novel opens, he's going after a budding biotech wizard named Julia Arocha, a scientist who doesn't play, of course, but who might be able to make the next great baseball player.

Kobo knows baseball—he used to be a player himself, until cyborgs ("oilers") got outlawed. He still has his cybernetic pitching arm, even, although these days it's hard to find upgrades that don't cost an arm and... well, you know. And Kobo's still intimately connected to the game: his big brother JJ Zunz is a star player for the Mets—right up until JJ dies, on-camera and rather spectacularly, during a playoff game against the ChicagoBio White Mice, most likely tanking the Mets' chance at winning the World Series.

Now Kobo's got a new mission... to find Zunz' killer.

The Body Scout doesn't take long to switch into hard-boiled detective mode... although at least one character points out, quite rightly, that Kobo is no detective. Fortunately, he's got help, ranging from a childhood buddy on the police force to an ex-lover who still has a soft spot for Kobo even though she's now playing for the other team (metaphorically, that is—"Deadeye" Dolores Zamora is a scout for the Pyramid Pharmaceuticals Sphinxes).

So Kobo does all of the traditional detective-novel stuff (he gets beaten up, for example... a lot), as he stumbles around trying to figure out just who killed JJ Zunz—and why. It's funny, and horrible, to watch as (for example) Kobo extracts a tracking grub from his cybernetic hand.

But... The Body Scout doesn't always seem to know what it wants to be, whether it's a slapstick satire or a serious extrapolation or the kind of ultraviolent ballet that A Clockwork Orange choreographed so well. The humor and the horror seem to cancel each other out, a lot of the time. Still, though, The Body Scout is a first novel, and I do wanna cut the guy some slack.

In other words...

Michel's a rookie to watch. He may not have knocked it out of the park with The Body Scout, but he shows a lot of promise, and if I'd been scouting him for the Orbit Books roster, I'd probably have signed him too.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

The Body Scout is an interesting novel, and its synopsis is what made me request it on NetGalley. I love any kind of science fiction thriller with a dystopian future and corporate-owned identities. Watching people fight back against the corporation will forever be one of the classic parts of science fiction. The Body Scout is no different, and the way it intertwines corporations into baseball was a great idea.

Being a biology major, I love anything genetic or biology based in stories. The premise of this book was pretty fun, having baseball players be subjected to genetic alterations and drug testing in order to play better. The major drug companies now own the baseball teams.

What I didn't care for was the baseball. I'm not going to give this book a "bad rating" because I knew it was about baseball going in. The baseball really isn't the forefront of the story either, so if you're concerned about not knowing anything about the sport, don't worry. If it's something really to be explained, Michel explains it. I did have a hard time connecting to the characters because they were so passionate about something I really couldn't care less about. The passion with the author, though, helped raise my rating.

It was also pretty funny seeing the baseball teams names, such as the Monsanto Mets.

Thank you to Net Galley, Orbit Books, and Lincoln Michel for this advanced review copy! The Body Scout releases on September 21st.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is about a baseball scout in an era where players have extreme body upgrades to perform better, and both cybernetic and biological upgrades are common among people in general. This is no shiny chrome paradise, however--in this future, upgrades are risky, cause problems only treatable by more upgrades, and ball players burn out and crash in a few years. The main character is desperately in debt for his own failing upgrades, and all he can think about is getting more.

Unfortunately, everyone in this story is unpleasant, and I didn't want to root for anyone. A perfectly reasonable perspective on these upgrades would be to avoid getting them at all, but the only people who take that perspective in the novel are the members of the crazy Diseased Eden cult, who spout religious nonsense and come across as lunatics. The world is intriguing, but nothing about it is good, and I didn't like any of the characters.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m reading another book that does this particular thing of writing A Billionaire and, like: it is so frustrating that these days writing A Billionaire has to be a specific parody. must he have the orange fake tan? must he be corpulent like this, his jaws sagging like that? must he have the fake hair? must he do the California bro accent, must he be falsely acclaimed as a genius and then revealed to be a nepo baby, and if he must have all these things, must he sell electric cars? the reason this frustrates me is not because Trump and Musk don’t deserve parody, but because I think this approach legitimately obscures satire—we all know damn well that what makes these guys the Type of Guys they are is not these caricature details, the easily parroted cadence of speech or whatever, not what they look like, but a particular quality in what they are. I mean this is what character writing is: don’t make a billionaire wear a bad toupee, ask “what is the reason for the toupee” and then have your guy take steroids or wear basketball jerseys even when there is no basketball going on or have one ear pierced or whatever for the exact same reason. give him a vocal cadence that makes the reader not say “oh, I recognize that cadence, Also It Burns My Fuckening Ears”, but instead “oh, now that you have provided this different but related example, I understand something new about why these other guys talk the way they do.” I mean like… if you want even the slim power that mockery provides, that’s what that power is, lol, it’s not this other thing

anyway, I’m only writing this because I don’t want to knock a star off the other book I’m reading (which handles this much more subtly, I should say) and so I don’t want to complain in that review. this was a good book though, I read it ages ago and thought at the time it was a whole blast, great stuff, I love baseball. a little too busy for its lens, but it gets a star put on for making me say “[X Media] where everything is exactly the same but halfway through the story [Protagonist] unscrews his dick” once every five months ever since

[Trike · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first pure cyberpunk novel I’ve read since the genre hit the big time back in the 80s. Daniel Suarez’s novels Daemon and Freedom™ were solid entries, but even they weren’t as grim and gritty as this book.

And very grim it is. Plus gross, with plenty of body horror, and darkly cynical about people and institutions. I loved it.

Shout-out to the cover artist; the design takes on new meaning once you get to the end of the book.

[Tori (InToriLex) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed all the creative ways our future is described. A tale of capitalism doing what it does best, erasing our humanity in the pursuit of consumption. The plot went too slow, although I did really like Kobo and Lila. The characters and this absurd world was a great escape, but could have done a lot better.

[idiomatic · Rating 4 out of 5]

you know a noir text understands philip marlowe as a source when the hero unscrews his own dick and leaves it on the table

[David A Townsend · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reads like a stolen Freshman manuscript from Introduction to Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. The positive reviews are more perplexing than the prose. Refund?

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

“But that’s the rub of modern life. We build better livers, and someone concocts stronger booze. We get sun treatments, then our chemicals burn up the ozone even more. Cure one disease, and another pops up. The pitcher juices up his throw, and the batter juices up his swing. On and on it goes.”

Kobo is a baseball scout—and former baseball star—who’s obsessed with body upgrades, so much so that he goes into impossible debt to get the latest limbs and organs. But when his famous brother literally explodes while playing for the Monsanto Mets, Kobo is hired by the team’s owner to find out who killed him and get his medical debt paid off in the bargain.

It’s a wild journey across a grungy, ugly cyberpunk future that corporations and the wealthy present as a utopia (wait a minute, that sounds a bit close to home…). In a near-future United States, we see how climate change has wreaked havoc and widened class divides. Capitalism rots the core of every industry, especially with the corporatization of baseball teams by bio-upgrade companies striving to sell their next product to the eager public. Every new technology manages to further corrupt the wealthy and squash the poor.

The whole book is a gallery of the grotesque with vivid descriptions of living sculptures made of real flesh, strange lab-created animals, and sex that doesn’t involve one’s own body parts. Really, it’s sci-fi blended with body horror, which aligns with the novel’s exploration of how we live in our bodies and how our bodies could become the next “luxury product.” As one of the characters says:

“We’re all trapped in these forms, aren’t we? Our minds get poured into them without anyone even asking us. We grow and live in them, and yet in many ways they are as incomprehensible to us as the cosmos.”

Kobo is a standard noir protagonist with his pessimistic viewpoint and wry first-person voice, but what differentiates him is his obsession with body upgrades that lend an interesting depth to his character. He’s complicit in the system and addicted to its promises of fulfillment while still being frustrated with it, a feeling most of us know all too well. I loved Dolores as a secondary character who goes beyond just a supporting role/love interest and the Mouth as an over-the-top (but, uh, rather familiar) corporate idiot. All of the secondary characters have agency and want to accomplish their own goals beyond those of the protagonist.

On a plot level, The Body Scout is a well-written homage to pulpy noir detective novels. It plays with the usual plot beats, character archetypes, and twists that you’d see in a murder mystery, just in an even darker futuristic setting (sci-fi and noir are bedfellows, after all, as Blade Runner shows). Sometimes the author is a little too in love with the world-building details, but I still found those asides entertaining, and you can tell he had fun creating and anticipating how every aspect of society might change. I especially appreciated representation of different gender identities and able-bodiedness, since those aspects aren’t often addressed in science fiction when it comes to new technologies.

Like any noir novel worth its salt, the story provides social critique that’s relevant to our current lifestyles. The characters’ indifferent acceptance of the way the world works—where everyone is driven by profit—was painfully familiar. I fear that there is no happy future for humanity, and that as in the novel, we will leave environmental disasters to be a problem for the next generation, and the systemic culprits of crimes will always get off scot-free. In that sense, the story’s ending is depressing to think about but ultimately realistic, and there’s validation in finding that honesty in fiction. The nihilism of the final image worked perfectly.

I requested the ARC of this book from NetGalley because I’m a big fan of Lincoln Michel’s writing newsletter Counter Craft. I was happy to find that The Body Scout embodies (sorrynotsorry) the literary/genre blend he often writes about in his essays. This novel is carefully constructed on both a plot and line level, and I hope to read more from Michel in the future.

[Meghan (TheBookGoblin) · Rating 5 out of 5]

ARC received in exchange for an honest review

This is the best Sci-Fi I've read in a long time. The Body Scout is smart, funny and weird and I loved every second. Kind of a techno-thriller of Crichton-esque proportions; a mix of Snow Crash, Repo: The Genetic Opera and Moneyball. The entirety of the world is run by mega biotech corporations and anything and everything is branded. Anyone can be anything if they have the cash.

Awesome things:
1. Transgender and non-binary individuals normalized!
2. Sports teams are all mixed-gender.
3. Highly realistic projection of the future both technologically and politically.

Not so awesome things:
1. Transitioning (genders) is portrayed as more of a strategic career move than as a natural step to becoming oneself.
2. The "highly realistic projection" I mentioned is bleak as fuck. Rampant racism and classism, corporate monopolies and toxic capitalism are the norm.

Some dope quotes:

"America had always been like that. Coke or Pepsi. Republican or Democrat. Monsanto or Pyramid. You were expected to pick a side and then scream like hell."

"We've got 'em all. Mammoth burgers, teriyaki tyrannosaurs wings, saber-toothed gyro platters. Those cocksuckers thought they could avoid being eaten by going extinct. Bunch of bufoons. Didn't count on human ingenuity. We can eat anything these days. Eat the past, present or future."

I highly recommend this not just for Sci-Fi fans but anyone who wants a fun ride through an all-too near future.

Thank you to NetGalley for the chance to R&R

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won a copy of The Body Scout through a goodreads giveaway. I don’t know much about baseball but that didn’t stop me enjoying this story. It’s a future where there’s lots of body modification, both physically and chemically, where you no longer have to deal with the constraints of a normal human body, provided you can afford the upgrades. Kobo is a baseball scout falling on hard times, deep in debt for his own body modifications from when he used to play baseball before the cybernetic mods were banned. Then his brother, from the family that adopted him when he was young, dies horrifically on the field and on camera, and he’s convinced it was murder. Now he’s trying to find who did it and why, and he’s also been hired by the company his brother worked for to do the same.

A fascinating mystery set in an interesting if sometimes sickening future, extrapolated from today, with everything being about money and profit and companies and governments corrupt and completely unaccountable to people and society. It was also, in many ways, a book about family and what that means, from biological to adopted families, from found families to budding relationships, and the different meanings different folks put on all these. This was certainly not a future I’d want any part of, but I thoroughly enjoyed the story. Though completely different it did sometimes bring to mind Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan. They both featured a depressing and dreary future full of a constant drive for profit, with imperfect characters striving to survive.

[Tammy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The nitty-gritty: Cyberpunk noir and baseball collide in this fast-paced, thoroughly entertaining sci-fi mystery.

Is science fiction kicking ass this year, or am I just choosing the right books to read? Either way, I keep discovering amazing new SF authors, and I’ve just added Lincoln Michel to that list. The Body Scout was so much fun and so well written, and it’s one of those stories that I hated to see end. It's an intriguing murder mystery set far in a future where body upgrades are the norm, animals are extinct, and baseball teams are owned by big pharma companies. If you’re a fan of Dan Stout’s The Carter Archives, you’ll probably love this, because it’s got a similar punchy noir vibe.

Kobo is a biopharm scout living in New York, paid to find cutting edge scientists to work for the companies who develop the latest drugs and treatments for the nation’s top baseball stars. Kobo himself used to play in the Cyber League, until it went under, that is. Now he’s obsessed with improving his own body by taking out loans for various surgeries and body part replacements, but his jobs are drying up and he’s in debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars to Sunny Day Healthcare Loans.

Kobo’s adoptive brother Julio Julio “JJ” Zunz is the star player for the Monsanto Mets, but one day Kobo is watching a game in a bar when Zunz drops dead at the plate, his death caught on camera for the world to see. Monsanto is calling it a tragedy, but Kobo thinks his friend was murdered. Kobo is shocked when the Mouth—the CEO of the Monsanto Mets—hires him to investigate Zunz’s death, promising to erase all his debt if he can pin the responsibility on the Mets rival team, the Pyramid Pharmaceuticals Sphinxes.

But once Kobo starts digging into Zunz’s last days, he discovers a tangled mystery involving a rival baseball team, a mad doctor, and illegal cloning. With help from his deaf ex-lover Dolores and a precocious twelve-year-old Edenist named Lila, Kobo must figure out who is responsible for Zunz’s murder, avoid a pair of nasty loan sharks named Brenda and Wanda, and delve into the secrets of the Janus Club and how it might relate to Zunz’s demise, all before the end of the World Series.

I really had fun with Lincoln Michel’s world. Like many SF books these days, the future is pretty bleak. Climate change has decimated the animal world and now odd creatures called “zootech” are made in laboratories. Advanced methods of replacing lost body parts and internal organs have become big business, and most people have at least one upgrade. And best of all, big league baseball teams are now owned by pharmaceutical companies who compete for championships by developing the best drugs to keep their players in top form. I loved the team names, like the Monsanto Mets, or the BodyMore Inc. Orioles. When Kobo played for the Cyber League, he was with the Boston Red Sockets. I mean, how can you not love that?? The combination of futuristic tech and baseball was so refreshing, and I’m not even a sports fan!

You can tell Michel had fun creating his world, there are so many awesome futuristic touches. For example, Kobo’s friend Dolores is deaf, but instead of fixing that deafness with a medical procedure, she decides to upgrade her other senses instead—like her cybernetic eye. She wears a pair of goggles that somehow translate speech into sign language so she can “hear” and communicate with others. I’m not sure exactly how that worked but it was pretty cool! One of my other favorite elements was that advances in cloning technology have led to Neanderthals being integrated into society, and in this story they’re the muscle of the big pharma companies. 

The main mystery—Kobo trying to figure out what happened to Zunz—is solid and well developed. I love that the Mouth has given Kobo a limited amount of time to solve the mystery, which drives the pacing and keeps the story hopping along. Kobo’s path to the truth is anything but smooth, though, and Michel throws in plenty of twists and surprises, not to mention danger, because when you mess with the Monsanto Mets and their nefarious plans for the future, you’re risking not only your neck but all your other body parts.

As much as I loved the worldbuilding and the plot, though, it was the characters who really won me over. The story is told in first person from Kobo’s point of view, so the reader really gets to know him and understand his motivations. Kobo lost an arm as a child when his apartment building collapsed, and now he has a cybernetic arm that he’s quite proud of. Unfortunately, he’s also addicted to body upgrades and keeps a running list of the improvements he’s determined to get one day, just as soon as he can pay off his current loan. Kobo goes through a lot in this book: getting beat up, trying to avoid loan sharks, and much more, but his loyalty to Zunz carries him through it all, as he’s determined to get justice for his death.

Then we have two of my other favorite characters, Dolores and Lila. Dolores is a scout for a rival baseball team, but she and Kobo still hang out together every now and then. Dolores was such a great character: smart and funny but also tough as nails and much more interested in keeping her job than helping Kobo. I loved that Michel made her deaf but gave her the tech to overcome that challenge. Lila, or “Nails” as she’s called by her fellow Edenists, is an angry twelve-year-old with a big secret that changes the course of the story, and I fell in love with her smartass personality. Michel’s dialog is so good, even the more unsavory characters, like Natasha the Neanderthal or the Mouth come across as entertaining. 

The author adds a nice layer of nostalgia to his tale, evoking the joys of childhood baseball, the good old days before big pharma swept in and changed the game. Michel sets his story in New York, and his love for the city shines through as well. Some weird shit happens near the end that turned the story into a sort of mad caper, and there are plenty of really well done action scenes--one memorable one takes place in Kobo's apartment. The story ends on a feel-good note, with just about everything resolved. And yet I feel like maybe there’s more to the story. The Body Scout isn’t listed as the start to a series, but it could easily become one, or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part.

Baseball fans will certainly find a lot to love here, but even if you aren’t a sports fanatic, you’ll probably love Lincoln Michel’s gritty future and prickly but loveable characters. 

Big thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set in a time when corporate pharmaceuticals run Future League Baseball, The Body Scout follows Kobo, whose job as a scout is to recruit scientists and occasionally a promising baseball player. America's favorite pastime is still prevalent in the future but with one minor change: the players are walking advertisements for the latest body enhancements. After watching his adopted brother, JJ, drop-dead mysteriously on home plate, Kobo is hired by the owner of Monsanto Mets to find out the culprit before the end of the World Series. Motivated to unravel the truth and possibly get a new upgrade out of it, Kobo soon finds that the death of his brother isn't the only strange thing happening within the FLB.

I'll admit that I had my concerns when I first started this book. I don't care for baseball. Like not even a little bit. The synopsis tells the reader that the MC is a scout for a baseball team. I thought that's where it would end, and I was very, very wrong. Baseball is woven into the plot thickly. And you know what? I fucking loved it. Not enough to get me to watch a baseball game but enough to buy Michel's future work in a heartbeat.

The worldbuilding is top-notch. A few reviews have mentioned it distracts from the plot. Don't listen to these people. If anything, the extensive worldbuilding sets this who-dun-it plot apart from others within the genre. There were several twists and turns that I didn't see coming. Not to mention, the pacing is dynamic. There wasn’t a single moment of boring information dumps, lulled conversation, or pointless flashbacks. Everything was purposeful and blended with the main plot effortlessly.

Outside of the storyline, I loved the small touches that brought this world to life. Anesthesia cigarettes, enhanced goggles for the deaf to read lips, interchangeable crotch upgrades, neanderthal clones, out-of-body experiences, the Edenists: a faction that shuns enhancements, and engineered animals called Zootech. I could easily read another story set in this world.

I highly recommend this book for fans of: noirs, mystery/thrillers, science fiction, body modifications, cli-fi, futuristic NYC, cyberpunk, baseball, society vs. corporations, and flawed characters.

[Ziggy Nixon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderfully over-the-top cyberpunk tale featuring a murderous blend of love, loss and baseball!

OK, let's get this out of the way from the get-go: if you don't like baseball (gasp… but how?), do not despair! It is not necessary to the central premise of this book that you be a diehard - or even part-time - fan. Just because it works so well - especially considering that the teams are from New York (omg, can you imagine that happening with either basketball or, bwhahaha, the American football teams in NYC?) is NOT the point! Think multi-tasking, think outside the box, hell's bells just throw the damn box away, capice? No matter what your preference is (or should that be where your preference lies?), this story was an absolute blast! And yes, there are a few jobs that fit so well into the baseball "system" (such as it is without a collective bargaining agreement in place as of this writing for next year) that it does wind up working really, really well!

Having said that (again: baseball has been very very good to me), I will admit that cyberpunk has not been a genre I've really batted a thousand with over the years (yep, more baseball lingo … meaning… oh forget it, just google it). However, if you can imagine and accept someone keeping a die-hard mystery flowing throughout this total reinvention of New York City - no wait, the world!! (pronounced WOILD for the New Jersey folks who have been adopted and eminently domained) - then you'd be hard-pressed to top the wild and wacky plot that Lincoln Michel has created for us readers! I loved the breath of the characters, I loved the flow of the whole "whodunnit", and I loved the vision of this corporate whored future (ooo yuck)! It all makes so much damn sense, too, it's just (makes 'kasploosh' motion around brain) too much! And don't get me started how much fun it was to finally figure out why we switch between burrows and burroughs at the beginning (no spoilers, noting you'll really - hee hee - dig it)!

This was, at its heart, a thoroughly enjoyable and just truly imaginative read. It's like someone had taken the modern day NYC reinventiveness of both Rick Gualtieri's "Bill" books (sans vampires) and combined it with the mysteries and noir-esque but humorful deliciousity of Douglas Lumsden's wild alternate reality of his signature "Alexander Southerland P.I." books! True, both of these authors - or better said both of these main series - deal primarily with urban fantasy, but no matter what the topic, focus or blood-thirstiness involved, it's so so nice to be able to kick off your shoes, take the phone off the hook (don't tell my boss, ok?) and just read uninterupted as the gods below intended! And if you're like me and have a relatively recent NYC visit under your belt (yes, pre-pandemic… which also pops up in the story! Or at least several of them do), then it's all the more fascinating to see how Michel leads us on a little tour of how the Big Rotten Apple has faced its future!

Oh and while we're at it, have I already mentioned how much I loved Michel's subtle nods to present day issues and "characters"? Take for example one character called simply The Mouth. And yes, it's a fitting descriptive. However, I couldn't for the life of me figure out of whom this could possibly be a mockery, oops, I mean representation (hint: sarcasm). See if you can figure it out:
"“I got it with nothing. Just my hard work. I started with jack shit, only a couple hundred million from my father…" The stream of words flowed out of his mouth like sewage through a drainage pipe."
Gosh oh gosh, who could it be now? Oh well, not that I was overly thrilled to see any of these folks evade deserved jail-time but we'll see how that holds up in our reality over the coming months!

Kids: read this book. And make sure come this spring to go to your local AAA games, they're so much fun! But you'll never view a visit to the ballpark (or most natural history museums or even zoos) the same way again, I promise you! Or even the pharmacy either! And we know how much fun that can be!

[Sidonie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Electrifying, original, with a strong voice and a wicked sense of humor. This is CYBERPUNK (yes the capital letters are necessary) in an exuberant, no-holds-barred way that is both a love letter to the genre and an exciting new entry within it. I was hooked from page one and didn't put it down until I finished.

Sometimes modern sci fi feels lacking in the weird and wild, without the playfulness and sense of possibility of its pulpy antecedents. The Body Scout is a corrective to that tendency, careening from gritty, noir-ish detective work to stomach-churning body horror to sharp-edged social commentary to riotous comedy with apparent ease. I can't wait to see what the author does next.

[Harrison · Rating 2 out of 5]

3/10. Okay we get it, you think the future is bleak. Seriously this book was just 350 pages of this guy making up all of these various ways in which the future will suck. Like get this guy some therapy. While this wasn't the worst book I've ever read, it was not good. I did finish it so that's something. Basically I wouldn't recommend this for anyone to read.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://www.bookwormblues.net/2021/08...

I absolutely love near future and social SciFi. It’s a genre I don’t read enough of, and it’s one that, if done well, will really leave me thinking some deep thoughts for a long time after I read the book. I adore the genre. I really do. So, the other day when I was flitting through Netgalley to see if anyone had anything on the offer that looked interesting, I saw this book and jumped on it.

I will be honest, though. I almost bounced off this book pretty hard when I just started reading it. The reason being, there’s a lot of baseball, and I think baseball is about as interesting as watching paint dry (I’m sorry, don’t throw things at me) so yeah. However, I have a feeling my threshold for interest in sports is abnormally low, so don’t let that deter you. Just be aware. If you don’t like reading about sports, aspects of this book might be something you need to power through.

That being said, the plot quickly takes off and things get moving in a whole bunch of different directions. At times, the worldbuilding was a bit overwhelming, and I think some readers could get a bit lost in the rapid fire details, but I actually liked that aspect of the book. I loved how much thought and attention the author put into just about every aspect of the world, the evolving culture, the relationships and more. This is a book that obviously took a lot of careful thought to write, and that paid off with a fascinating story set in a world that is similar enough to ours to be believable. It did the thing I love these sorts of books for: It made me think.

In this near-future world, body modifications are the hot thing. The body you are born with is more a suggestion than anything else, and people pay good money to modify and upgrade themselves. They go in debt for body modifications. They hire people to hunt for the right body modification. Sometimes modifications become outdated. It’s a whole thriving, wild industry and it’s the core of this book.

Baseball comes into this because while the game is the same as the we know now, the players have changed. They’ve modified their bodies for improved performance, and our protagonist, Kobo, has his finger on the pulse on the modification market. He gets called by his professional athlete brother, who is a bit out of sorts, seems off, and Kobo isn’t that surprised. Sometimes this sort of thing can happen with mods. However, Kobo is surprised when his brother ends up dead. The League hires him to investigate his brother’s death, and we go down a Who Done It rabbit hole that had some impressive twists and turns.

The plot is pretty relentless. It doesn’t take much time to get to the mystery at the center of this book, and then it takes even less time to realize that not everything is as it seems. In this future vision of our world, evolution is guided by humans, and there’s a lot of deep, dark secrets into just how things are progressing on that front. So while Kobo’s investigation is interesting, it was really the world itself that almost gripped me more than anything else, and the social and personal problems that ensued from a future where humanity is so dramatically focused on modifications for personal improvement.

The Body Scout is pretty relentlessly paced. There’s never really any downtime, which reminded me a lot of some noir books I’ve read, where no one really has time to rest. It’s constantly one thing, then another, then another. Things are just constantly moving, which keeps it interesting, but perhaps I would have longed for some quiet moments occasionally. Some pauses in the motion to give both Kobo and the reader time to breathe and really digest the story a bit more.

Kobo was a character that I instantly liked. He’s flawed, self-absorbed, and focused on surgeries and modifying his own body with very little regard to the debt he finds himself in. However, as the book progresses, Kobo grows and evolves. He’s not the same man at the end as he was at the beginning. He starts to feel some empathy. He starts to look at the world a bit differently. Still flawed to his core, I found his personal arc, how the events he was enmeshed in changed him, to be rather fascinating and extremely well done.

I will say, baseball stays a theme throughout this book, and I did detach from that part of it because… baseball… but that’s my personal flavor and that’s not the author’s problem. I will also say that this was an absolutely wonderful debut offering. It was wild, and unexpected, with some of the best near-future worldbuilding I’ve seen in a long time. The plot was intricate, and the author’s attention to detail truly floored me. So, if you’re a fan of near-future SciFi, and you don’t mind baseball, you’ll probably want to check this one out.

[Kat · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars but really a pretty good debut. Thanks to NetGally for the ARC for this.

I found this by just randomly looking through netgally for some sci-fi books so I really did not know much about this book going in. This is basically a book imagining what the world might look like given the progression of current technology, capitalism, commercialism, climate change, etc. etc. Kobo is a scout for futuristic baseball teams which are now all owned by big pharma companies and his brother, a professional baseball player, is killed while playing a baseball game. Some it felt very realistic (like there's a quote about how people started rooting for pharma companies after they brought sports back after a pandemic and Pfizer is specifically mentioned...) and some of it felt less so but the whole story was at the least very interesting.

The world building is definitely the highlight in this book. It's clear that Michel spent a lot of time developing this part of his story. You can tell while reading that there could be a lot more of the world building put in this book if the author chose to do that. It makes the story feel a lot more developed because of the level of thought put into the world. Again, sometimes it felt like the future being imagined bordered on caricature or satire but when it worked I thought it really worked.

The issue I would say about the world building was sometimes it dominated the book a little too much. This is a mystery story but I felt that a bit of the mystery gets lost in the descriptions of everything else that was happening. I was okay with how the mystery resolved, though I definitely had some issues but along the way I never felt like I ever had an opportunity to figure anything out. Sometimes the pace of the mystery slowed to a crawl while other times it felt very fast. I just never got a sense of the stakes of the mystery itself outside of it's relationship to Kobo paying off his medical debt. I really just felt like the impact of that story got buried by everything else.

The other thing I felt got lost a bit was characterization. I did like the character of Kobo and one other character that shows up later but everyone else felt so tangential. I felt like I knew nothing about Kobo's sort of girlfriend Dolores besides that she was Deaf and another scout, Kobo's cop friend was really underdeveloped, and even his brother, a main motivator of the story, felt more like he was just motivation rather than an actual character. A lot of those characters had important moments later on but because I didn't feel like I knew them at all, any twists they were involved in fell a bit flat. Like I said, I did like Kobo and as he's the main character that was enough to keep me going and invested in the story but I would have liked to see a bit more work on the side characters. I honestly think this book would be so improved if it was just tightened up in a few places and maybe one side character and one or two events from Kobo's past were just taken out so that the story could be more streamlined.

I do think for a debut, this is good. There's a lot of interesting ideas here and I think if Michel publishes more novels, they will only get better from here. I think my best advice would be to take a few important elements of the world building and really focus in on those to create a more streamlined narrative. I liked the imagination of the future and as a baseball fan, I liked the baseball stuff. I'm definitely interested in seeing what this author does next as well as seeing other reactions to this book. If you're looking for a weirder sci-fi book, this might be great for you.

[Joshua Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ok I don’t think this book is five stars for most people but this book was clearly written for me. Mixing Bladerunner, Philip Marlowe, and with a generous sprinkle of humor has created a novel that engulfed me and made me consider staying home from work to finish it.

To create a monstrous dystopia that you still make desirable to visit is a triumph and framing it in a genetics-manipulated and drug-laden future MLB run my Pharma was exquisite.

Tl;dr: If you don’t like baseball, noir novels, and sci-fi do not read this novel. If you like all three you’ve got a new favorite.

[Edwin Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set in a future full of corporate and biological espionage, THE BODY SCOUT, by Lincoln Michel, follows Kobo, a struggling baseball scout and former baseball player himself who is obsessed with upgrading his own body with cybernetics whenever he can. Then he watches his baseball superstar brother, JJ Zunz, horrifically die at home plate in front of millions of viewers. Still reeling from the loss of his brother, he is recruited to investigate Zunz's death and finds himself deep in the underworld of questionable medical practices and big business corruption.
Michel has created a remarkably complex and fascinating world that is not just believable but a likely future for humanity. The amount of detail that Michel provides paints such a clear vision while keeping it as concise as possible so as not to slow the story down. The science of this world is interesting, sometimes a little icky, but always helpful in telling the story. Kobo, along with all of the the major supporting characters, are compelling to read about mostly because they all have unique imperfections that make them real, not just cardboard cutouts of people. And most all the them are selfish and opportunistic, which also make them more colorful and fun to read about. Some nice twists and unexpected revelations throughout the book,
THE BODY SCOUT is several things: a sci-fi thriller, a corporate espionage mystery, and satire of where our world could end up. All of those things together makes for a great read!
Thank you to Orbit Books, Lincoln Michel, and Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

[Audrey Approved · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the setting of The Body Scout could be an adaptation for an HBO series. This was so, so rich in its world-building and imagery - you can tell Michel has thought deeply about the quirks and qualities of this futuristic New York City ravaged by climate, plague and rampant body editing. As I read, I kept thinking of the movie Blade Runner 2049 and its visual effects. I also really like the characterization of the main lead. He's gritty and darkly complex, but still the traditional "good guy" of the story.

Where this book loses points is in the mystery that defines the entire plotline (as set out in the book blurb). It is kind of predictable, and not super engaging. There's no twist, and honestly not a lot of suspense. A better mystery could have hit this out of the park.

3.5 stars!

I voluntarily obtained a digital version of this book free from Netgalley and Orbit Books in exchange for an honest review.

[Claire Holroyde · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. If you were drawn to the gritty future of noir detective Rick Deckard of DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRONIC SHEEP by Philip K. Dick, and the wry, anti-capitalist humor and sharp dialogue of SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY by Gary Shteyngart, and the love of baseball shared by childhood friends many generations from now in THE RESISTORS by Gish Jen…
Then you need to read THE BODY SCOUT by Lincoln Michel, my Fiction Recommendation for October

[Mitch Loflin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the book. I love the book! I recommend this if you love having fun, I do not recommend this if you hate having fun, and I think whether you like baseball or not is ultimately not really a contributing factor to whether or not you'll like it. I do have some "ok but how come _____" follow-up questions about some of the ending, but the fact is I had such a good time so it doesn't really matter.

[Bill Reed · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hardboiled style (think James M Cain) comes to baseball and PEDs. Combination did not work for me. Quit before Chapter 10.