The Body Scout by Lincoln Michel

​    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 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.