Please see previous reviews for an overall summary.

Max and Leon are recovering from all the damage they sustained in the last book. Their son, Matthew, is still residing with the Time Police to keep him safe from that psychotic Ronan.  He seems to be a young teenager but since no one knows how old he is, it’s a guess.  He’s still the biggest mystery in the series.

Max is desperate for a final solution to the Ronan issue so that Matthew can come home to them, permanently.  In a rare moment of insight, she gets an idea.  After consulting with Dr. Bairstow and getting a green-light, she’s finds herself seconded to The Time Police.  Yes, the very same bastards who haven’t been able to find Ronan themselves and generally make themselves very unlikeable. It becomes obvious pretty early on that she’s undercover but that’s not going to make her existence in Time Police headquarters any easier as no one seems to know that except Commander Hay.

On her first day, while her son Matthew is in class which happens to be in the Map Room, everything goes tits-up.  Matthew, being both brilliant and incomprehensible, does the unthinkable – he breaks the Time Map.  According to him, it was already broken.  Once the damage becomes clear, the Time Police are off to break heads, or kill someone, or something.  Max is insistent they will need a Historian (such as herself) to find the problem and fix it.  This took a small chunk of pages.  Once a successful conclusion was reached, Max requested and got a few days off to visit St. Mary’s, Leon and find a decent cup of tea.  But when she got there, St. Mary’s wasn’t…there. That idiot Halcombe was, along with a difficult number of military idiots.  And while he’d like to know exactly where/when St. Mary’s got off to, he has a different first priority.

Since St. Mary’s absconded with every single thing not nailed down, the pod that Max arrived in is of great interest to Halcombe.  And he, apparently, has buyers who are interested in what profit history can provide; and now he has a pod. Max is coerced into piloting the pod to Jerusalem; a completed forbidden place and time. And while it’s possible the pod will simply explode, she can’t take that chance so she determines the only possible way out is to simply refuse to open the door or to return.  The Time Police, in their usual inimitable style, arrived in the nick of time; well, almost. But the current crisis isn’t over.  Max still needs to find where St. Mary’s went and it may well entail dropping in through the chimney.  And there’s still the niggling little question of just who provided Halcombe with those particular coordinates.

But wait!  There’s more!  Max still needs to get back to the Time Police to enact her devious plan to find and trap Ronan.  And through some very convoluted plotting and reasoning, she determines she’ll have to enter a very high-society, very expensive…wait for it…sex club.  The rest of that part is just hilarious.

I’d like to say that ‘all’s well that ends well” but we’re talking about St. Mary’s here.  It’s a good day when no one dies but Max hasn’t had many good days lately.  The ending was a bit shocking to this reader and really, really threw Max over.  Not exactly a cliff-hanger but will certainly keep the series going.

Leon didn’t have much to do this time out but we did get a couple snippets of information about Matthew.  Max might’ve burned bridges with the Time Police; with whom she had a semi-respected relationship but I don’t think she’ll be able to expect their help anytime soon.  I still love the characters although there wasn’t much from either Markham or Peterson; but we did get to visit with those two zany teenagers who pilot their own pod which operates a bit differently than either St. Mary’s or the Time Police.  They were a lot of fun and I have deliberately left out their contribution to the story from this review.

Taylor continues to dazzle me with her dialogue.  There are so very many characters now that she’d be hard-pressed to give everyone something to do in every story but I enjoy the ones who do get center stage.  I always look forward to seeing how much damage she can do to herself and still prevail.  And I’m definitely in this for the long-haul to see what’s up with Matthew.   ~~  Catherine Book

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