Lock In (John Scalzi)

Scalzi's latest is a murder mystery/police procedural set in a future where a new illness left a substantial percentage of the population has been locked in, with complete awareness and full cognitive functioning but no voluntary control over their own bodies. Technology allows these people to live full lives in two ways: through remote operation of a mechanical bodies (charmingly called "threeps") or, much more rarely, through stepping in to the brains of people called Integrators and taking over their bodies for a while. The protagonist is one of the locked-in folks, starting his first day on the job as an FBI agent and faced with a bizarre murder involving an integrator. The murders proliferate and lead him to the fringes and the center of the new world culture being created by and for the thousands upon thousands of locked-in people. Many of the standard tropes of the genre are here -- the tough-talking, hard-drinking partner, the tension between the Feds and the local police, the triumphant confrontation with drunken thugs harassing a woman on the streets, the interrogation of suspects dancing the line between intimidation and the law -- but they all have a new twist because of the futuristic setting. I quite liked it.