If we ever managed to figure out time travel, who would
control it? How would we prevent time tourists from messing with the past—and would
that warp the present, as in the grandfather paradox? In Rob Hart’s latest
novel, The Paradox Hotel, the US government has been policing time
tourism and historical research expeditions, only now they’ve run out of funds
and the franchise is about to go to auction.
January Cole works security at the Paradox Hotel, which
hosts time travelers awaiting their scheduled “flights to the past” at the nearby
Einstein Institute. She’s a seasoned time traveler herself, having made many trips
as part of the policing agency. As a result of spending too much time in the
past, she’s become Unstuck, with the result that she often sees events and
people from prior times. The best of these incidents allow her to be with her
sweet, loving girlfriend, now dead. But January’s condition is worsening, and
she’s not only seeing the past but the future. That future includes a corpse in
Room 526.
With trillionaires arriving for the auction, baby
velociraptors on the loose, and January’s grip on the present moment growing
ever less reliable, it’s inevitable that more things will go wrong…starting
with a series of “accidents” befalling the powerful, ultra-wealthy bidders. Clocks
run backward, time seems to stutter, the treatment for being Unstuck no longer
works, and January’s running out of time to stop the murder.
I loved the convolutions of time, January’s wrestling with
grief and guilt, the dips into the past, and of course, the baby velociraptors that
grow much too fast, all with the fast pacing of a thriller. In short, Hart’s
time-twisting murder mystery satisfies on many counts.
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