NOW, THEN, AND EVERYWHEN

It’s a race against—and through—time to keep history from going wrong.

For Tyson Reyes and his friends, time travel is just another day at the office. He’s a historian in 2304 working on his first big research trip, to the segregated South in 1963. But he has no idea that the project his friend Richard is proposing, a study of the KKK’s protests against the Beatles, is about to get him embroiled in a massive time shift that could erase most of history as he knows it. Meanwhile, 168 years in Tyson’s past and 170 years in the Beatles’ future, Madison Grace has just discovered a device that allows her to travel through time—and a book from the future that claims that she’s about to invent time travel. When the time shift hits, Madi assumes she’s caused it by blundering about in the past. But who are the five extra time travelers Tyson spots in 1963 just before history goes haywire? And how can Madi and Tyson fix history if they don’t even know what game they’re playing or who the players are? There’s more than enough time-travel paradoxes in this story to give you a headache, but the captivating mystery plot—who set history wrong, and why?—moves along briskly enough that these conundrums just feel like part of the entertainment. And the 1960s setting, with the fates of the Beatles and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. riding in the balance, sets the stakes appealingly high. Fans of Walker’s (Courier to the Stars, 2019, etc.) CHRONOS Files series will enjoy seeing the pieces of that mythology falling into place here, but new readers can easily jump in to this origin story with no prior knowledge.

An enjoyable, mind-bending time-travel adventure.