PIVOT POINT

Manchester’s series-starter mixes a crime thriller with elements of time-travel SF.

When readers are introduced to Blake Everhart, she is reeling over the murder of her brother and grappling with her recent suspension from the U.S. Marshals for punching a fellow deputy. In need of an agent with her particular skill set, Blake’s superiors call her back into action to help resecure an especially dangerous fugitive named Robert Canton. The convoy transporting him goes awry, and after a pulse-pounding action scene in which Blake dispatches a crooked cop and nearly recaptures Canton, he escapes into the woods. Acting fast, Blake organizes a search and is provided with a new team—but this one comes with a “monitor” named Rivas, who’s there to make sure Blake doesn’t go off the rails again. They track Canton to the small town of Pacific, Tennessee, where Blake seeks answers at the hospital where he was treated. Once there, she is drugged by Thomas Lancaster, a doctor sympathetic to Canton, only to wake up and discover she has traveled back in time—or “pivoted,’” as the title has it—to earlier that morning, giving her the chance to “do-over” her decisions of the last few hours. Returning to the hospital, she makes an unlikely ally of Dr. Naomi Preston, who happens to be Lancaster’s ex-wife. The narrative then proceeds much in the way stories in this genre often do, with Blake discovering a criminal enterprise far larger and more sinister than anything she had previously imagined. While the plot certainly isn’t groundbreaking, it moves at a pace that makes the novel compulsively readable, and Manchester’s vivid rendering of Pacific evokes a sort of cloistered small-town setting that provides a welcome juxtaposition to the requisite action (“walking trails slither through Sugar Creek Park with the occasional wooden bench. Battered and damp, the sign pointing out each trail barely resists the punishing weather. Deserted, the disc golf course glistens under the rain as the chains rattle with each gust”). Blake herself may have some tropey characteristics, but she displays enough individuality to carry the action in these pages with aplomb.

A snappy, exhilarating first installment in a genre-bending series.