A new time-traveling fantasy from National Book Award-winner Lisa Goldstein.
Ann Decker fixes computers for a living, and in the evenings she passes the time sharpening her hacking skills. It's not a very interesting life, but she gets byuntil one day she's contacted with a job offer for a company called Transformations Incorporated. None of her coworkers have ever heard of it before, and when Ann is finally told what the company does, she can hardly believe it: TI has invented technology to travel in time.
Soon Ann is visiting a matriarchy in ancient Crete, and then a woman mathematician at the Library of Alexandria. But Transformations Incorporated remains shrouded in mystery, and when Ann finally catches her breath, there are too many troubling questions still unanswered. Who are Transformations Incorporated, and what will they use this technology to gain? What ill effects might going back in time have on the present day? Is it really as harmless as TI says?
When a coworker turns up dead, Ann’s superiors warn her about a covert group called Core out to sabotage the company. Something just isn’t right, but before she has time to investigate, Ann is sent to a castle in the south of France, nearly a thousand years in the past. As the armies of the Crusade arrive to lay siege, and intrigue grows among the viscount’s family, Ann will discover the startling truthnot just about the company that sent her there, but also about her own past.
Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
Sure the first third of the book was very rushed, but I've read enough time travel books to be okay with the fact that the whole training sequence was reduced to a 10-page montage. I get the drill, no need to dwell. The only thing that made me scratch my head was the level of training the travelers were put through. Because the 5th floor is keeping the why of the missions secret it seems like they barely needed to be trained-- just teach them the language and punt them in for the 48 hours it's supposed to take. Why would you need to know the political situation if all you're told to do is move some lamps around and not think critically about why?
Nevertheless, by the end I was hooked and wondering the same thing as the protagonist-- how is she possibly going to take a stand and make any difference at all? Is this is part of a series? Feels like it, but I can't find the next if it is.
Light read, similar to lots in the genre, but the differences are interesting and will make the rest of the series, if there is indeed to be more, worth reading on a beach.
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