Red, White, and the Blues

Walker delivers a clever but bloated time-travel caper in her high-stakes second CHRONOS Origins adventure (after Now, Then, and Everywhen). In the year 2304, wealthy sociopath Morgen Campbell leads a sadistic team of time travelers in Temporal Dilemma, a competitive game played by altering events in American history with the goal of preventing the U.S. from ever having entered WWII. In 2136, historian Madison Grace enlists the help of CHRONOS time agent Tyson Reyes, himself based in 2304, to determine which of several historical events that Campbell’s team have altered prevented the bombing of Pearl Harbor: the conversion of Catholic priest Charles Coughlin to the new Cyrist religion in 1938, an attack on the Japanese ambassador to the U.S. in 1939, the attempted assassination of aviator Charles Lindbergh in 1940, or a bombing at the 1940 World’s Fair. As Madi and her crew travel across time to put history to rights and save millions of lives, they dodge traps set by Campbell and uncover the possible betrayal of one of their own. While Walker’s energetic prose pulls readers along, the convoluted strategies to fix the timeline branch out in increasingly circuitous directions. Fans of time-travel stories will appreciate the historical detail and characters’ ingenuity, but may feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of plot. [em](Jan.) [/em]