A Symphony of Echoes

A Symphony of Echoes
by Jodi Taylor
Recommended Ages: 14+

Dr. Madeline Maxwell, a.k.a. Max, has risen to chief operations officer at St. Mary's Institute of Historical Research – an outfit that not only studies history, but defends it from evildoers intent on destroying it. And I'm not just talking about the written accounts of history, or the evidence beneath them, but the actual fabric of history itself. See, these folks are time travelers. And unfortunately, they're not the only ones.

In this second installment in the Chronicles of St. Mary's, Max and friends face deadly peril, and at times are deadly peril, while studying at bare-eyeball distance such historical events as Jack the Ripper's last confirmed murder, the assassinations of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral and Sennacherib amid the Hanging Gardens of Nineveh(!), and one event on which all historical continuity strangely hinges – a turning point in the reign and romantic life of Mary Queen of Scots. And the historians, technicians, security personnel and all the rest have their hands full, not only ensuring that these events go off without a hitch but also getting away with their skins intact and the timeline uncontaminated. And they're not at all helped in this by the fact that the dastardly Clive Ronan, with time pods of his own, is hell-bent on changing the course of history.

Besides Ronan's efforts to meddle with the past, other mysteriously connected plots are afoot. One of them has to do with a "lost" play by Shakespeare, which has an historically impossible plot twist. There's also an episode involving a luxury psychiatric clinic for the rich and famous, where the leading doctor plies his considerable talent for suggestion on both Max and her beloved Leon Farrell. But the damage he does is nothing compared to the ruin Max and the St. Marys find in the future, where (I mean when) Ronan and his goons have pressed a direct attack on their institute. All this, between the bloodcurdling thing Max and her retiring pal Kal bring back from 1888 Whitechapel and the horrible thing Max has to do to in 1567 Edinburgh, dramatizes the cost of being a time-traveling historian devoted to preserving history as it is.

You'd like it to be a walk in the park, but it turns out to be Jurassic Park. Sure, there's wit and humor in this story, and a certain sexiness as well. But it's also, and mainly, a suspenseful, thrilling and often dangerous business, fraught with heartbreaking tragedy, near-tragedy, pain and even gut-deep horror. Horror at what you might have to do and live with afterwards. Horror at the unknown and unexplainable. Horror at the darkness that lies within people throughout time. And the bone-chilling horror of realizing that Jodi Taylor has written at least one novel, A Bachelor Establishment, under the same pseudonym as a character she, and I mean Max, shoots dead in this book. Max is not a woman to cross, make no mistake.

I think in my review of Just One Damned Thing After Another I mentioned other series of books Taylor has written. This series, meanwhile, goes on in such titles as A Second Chance (incongruously, the third novel), A Trail Through Time, No Time Like the Past, What Could Possibly Go Wrong, and going on nine more novels, plus a scattering of short stories and novellas. The 15th novel, Well, That Could Have Gone Better, is supposed to come out a little less than a year from now, as I write this. And my local library system doesn't have any of the books after this one. Oh, Max. You're going to cost me dearly.