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Jodi Taylor always drops a new short story on Christmas Day and I usually manage to read it same day, but we got a dinner invitation so I just managed to squeeze this in before New Year. It’s charming and funny, based on the Agatha Christie style of murder mystery. Leon takes Max back to the 1920s for a week of R&R in a country house hotel. Food, rest, tea, and more food. It’s all going terribly well until a body falls at Max’s feet – literally – and despite the fact that the house is full of (deliberately) cliché Christie-esque characters with dark secrets, Leon is the only one without an alibi. A short read, but a fun one.Tags:
Barely recovered from their last adventure (on the train) Team 236 (Team Weird - Luke, Jane and Matthew) are tentatively back in business (though still under supervision), but things aren't going well for the Time Police in general. Construction work reveals (or rather re-reveals) a huge cover-up from that last days of the time war, before Commander Hay became the TP boss, but it's something she'll have to deal with one way or another. A dinosaur shows up in Wales, which causes Hay to request the assistance of Maxwell from St Mary's. No one is quite sure which is going to be the biggest problem, Max or the dinosaur. In Ancient Rome, a St Mary's mission is trying to find out what happened to the city's founder, Romulus, when TP officer Varma turns up and kidnaps him. There's a gnarly knot in the time map which Matthew spots, but can he unravel it? And then everything goes tits-up when a time pod AI starts screaming murder. When long-time antagonist Henry Plympton reappears with a scheme to kidnap and murder the Princes in the Tower, things can't get much worse for the beleaguered Time Police. This book does feature Luke, Jane and Matthew, but also hefty chunks of Commander Hay and her long-suffering adjutant, Charlie Farrenden, Lt. Grint and his usual team, plus the aforementioned Varma and assorted characters we've met before. This book was published on 9th and by 10th October I'd galloped through it. A new Jodi Taylor is always a drop-everything-and-grab-it moment. Glad I did. The only thing missing was Markham... or was he?
A complex, quirky time travel novella which takes place (mostly) at the end of time, after the Causality War has destroyed pretty much everything. The first person narrator – I'm not sure we ever learn his name – is a survivor of the war determined never to let it happen again, however-many people he has to kill if they find their way to his idyllic farm. He lives pretty well. Robots do most of the work, though he amuses himself by looting different time-streams for whatever he needs. If he gets lonely he simply gets into his own time machine and pops out to the 1700s for a party at Versailles or goes to see a Shakespeare play – with the Bard himself. His pet allosaurus, Miffly, helps him to dispose of errant time travellers. He also goes gadding around the timestreams putting an end to anyone who might contemplate time travel. Then one day, visitors arrive from the future. How can that be when he's already at the end of time itself? Weldon and Smantha (that's not a typo) come to viisit, and suddenly he has a problem. It seems he might be their many greats-grandfather. How is he going to avoid a second epochalypse? Funny and poignant in turns this is as sharp as a tack and well worth reading even though it chucks your logic circuits into a blender and serves them back up to you with a side order of wheee! I loved it.
