This is a highly entertaining time-travel series by a British writer.  The premise is that there is St. Mary’s Institute of Historical Research where the resident historians “investigate major historical events in contemporary time”.  Just don’t call it time travel.  While time, itself, has certain safeguards to prevent messing with the timeline; St. Mary’s also has rules in place about what can and cannot be done.  And the Historians do try to follow those rules…mostly.  A successful mission means the mission parameters were met…it doesn’t always mean everyone comes home in one piece, or at all.

So Max is back with St. Mary’s and has, apparently, been accepted back into the fold with all her foibles.  She has picked back up again with Leon and has resumed playing Battleship with Peterson. Oh, and Director Bairstow confirmed her as the new Chief Operations Officer. That actually didn’t sound so bad to her, but she hadn’t anticipated one of her new responsibilities: public relations for St. Mary’s. And what does that entail, you ask?  Only the minor inconvenience of organizing Open Day for St. Mary’s.  In the author’s words:  what could go wrong?  More like – what won’t go wrong.

But if all Max had to contend with was Open Day (and the possibility of explosions and all sorts of other mayhem) her life might’ve been pleasant enough.  But when Markham kept seeing a body dropping off the roof of St. Mary’s, it became a mission. (why it became a mission doesn’t seem to have a logical reason, other than it was a good excuse to go into the past of St. Mary’s itself) So off they go, Max, Markham and Peterson, to chase a ghost in 1643. As usual, history may have hit the high points but it rarely gets it all right; and the devil is, as they say, in the details.  And, after finishing that small section of the book, this reader was left confused:  why did they have to go?  Since their appearance wasn’t a foregone conclusion, wouldn’t they expect to have impacted events?  Which is why they very nearly changed history…I would’ve liked to debate with Bairstow as to what might have happened had they not gone.  On the other hand, Markham would have continued to have been plagued with seeing that damnable ghost and the author did not give me any closure by declaring that Markham was now ghost-free.  Why wouldn’t he have continued to see it?  …sigh…sometimes it’s hard to be that fly on the wall.

On to the next event…having checked outstanding assignments for something a bit more staid and less dangerous, Max decided on a visit to the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851.  They were just there to take lots of pictures; no real need for a security detail.  (Why on earth did they think that?? It’s St. Mary’s, after all; there’s always a need for a security detail.)  Of course, no one could have predicted that Ronan would show up.  Of course, it would be an older Ronan; one who deliberately picked this time and place because a much younger Bairstow and a young woman named Annie Bessant would be there.  Annie being the paramour tof both men when they were all young causing a rather unpleasant triangle and leading Ronan to become an outcast and the dastardly bad guy in this series.  Anyway, Ronan is there to kidnap Annie and prevent all the unpleasantness that still hadn’t happened.  Max, of course, realized she must prevent this or history will be altered.  But she is so tempted to just kill the bastard and stop all this.  Unfortunately, possibly, she cannot since Ronan still has things to do that would impact the history of St. Mary’s. ( Yes, I agree: this is quite confusing.)

Enough of all that, back to the preparations for Open Day.  St. Mary’s enjoys a somewhat precarious relationship to the University of Thirsk who often have trouble understanding why they are funding such shenanigans; it is Director Bairstow’s hope that Open House will foster a more amiable relationship.  So it was rather astonishing to Max to find that he had been baited into accepting a challenge and she now has to work in a boat race between St. Mary’s and Thirsk; with a bet riding that will seriously impact Max herself.

In an effort to possibly mitigate whatever disaster is sure to follow, Max starts to explore other ways to satisfy Thirsk.  Since their last salvage operation at the Great Library of Alexandria impressed the hell out of Thirsk, she thinks a similar expedition would not only keep them in good graces but maybe pay for the continuing expense of repairing St. Mary’s.  She fixes on the event of the Great Fire of London which, in addition to destroying a large portion of the city, completed destroyed the St. Paul’s cathedral.  It is Max’s reasoning that there should be plenty of religious artifacts in addition to the public mistakenly believing their own valuables would be safer in St. Paul’s than at home.  It really is only a matter of timing; they need to get to St. Paul’s after the fire has started so that there will be no people, and they need to get out before it’s completely engulfed.

For once, Max cannot go on this mission since she has already been in this time period (capturing dodos…) and it’s generally considered to be quite dangerous to create a paradox.  But she has no choice but to follow the mission when no one returns. Twelve people, four pods…gone.  Not an acceptable situation but it’s calculated that Max has a possible window of an hour to find her people and get them out; a window that Markham has to enforce.  Enforcement means that if Max gets herself into a delay of any kind, he’ll have to kill her to prevent a paradox.  Pretty serious shit.  What Max and Markham find when they get to St. Paul’s is just incomprehensible…and the effort needed to free her people and the very real possibility of burning alive brings her to the deadline with just seconds to spare.  And they still lost someone…

Whew, that was pretty intense but the salvage operation appeared to be a success; with the only exception being the loss of one of their historians.  Unfortunately, once the salvaged items were dug up from where they had been safely buried four hundred years earlier, the truth was uglier than anyone could have imagined.  What they found in the chest they’d buried, was enough to rock St. Mary’s and did nothing to improve their standing with Thirsk.

There was still the possibility of St. Mary’s winning the boat race at Open Day.  There was, also, the possibility of everything going tits-up with the requisite explosions and disasters.  Max was not looking forward to it but the day finally came.  In an attempt to stay out of harm’s way, Max had one tiny job: guard the objects that the boat teams had to acquire so that no one thieved them away.  A quiet little job in a quiet part of the forest…what could go wrong?  (a sentiment that should be in each employee’s contract…)  But it did, of course, go wrong.  So very wrong.

Once Max was released from medical care, she had to consider the welfare of St. Mary’s.  Since the salvage operation at St. Paul’s was unsuccessful, she started casting about for a better opportunity.  Fortunately, one did come to mind:  The Bonfire of the Vanities in Florence circa 1497.  Apparently, Botticelli got caught up in the religious fervor of the times and consigned the last few of his best paintings to the fire.  It is Max’s hope they might rescue those paintings.  And, you never know, they might be successful, Max might not be hurt or made dead, and they might not threaten the stability of history.  A lot of “mights” and no guarantee that they’ll even get one out of three…

And throughout all these adventures, Max and Leon are still trying to find common ground for their relationship.  Poor Leon has been sorely tasked by all the times and ways that Max manages to almost get killed.  It’s become rather intolerable for him so he could hardly be blamed for what Max drove him to.  And I, sniff, just cannot describe it.

Their last mission should also have been described as a “slam dunk”: Thermopylae.  This was the last stand of Sparta against the aggressions of Xerxes (immortalized in the 2006 Zack Snyder movie “300”).  All they had to do was gain a high vantage point, well away from the carnage, and film it.  Why is it that nothing ever goes according to plan?  This time it wasn’t Max’s fault; it was Markham’s.  In his defense, though, his reaction to being caught squatting with his pants down, in the dark, on a mountainside, was reasonable.  You just wouldn’t think a little thing like a rock alongside someone’s head would completely change history.

The story had to have a new crisis at the end and Taylor doesn’t disappoint.  It might seem a little trite to involve Max and Leon in another altercation between a car and a tree but Taylor makes it work.  I always feel a little breathless at the end of these books.  The story tends to go at a breakneck pace. I don’t know how these people keep up the pace…

I know, I do tend to go on with my reviews of this series.  I guess I just want to tell everyone about how much fun these are to read.  I can’t find a way to summarize it easily; each mission has its own place in the story.  To skip even one would seem to diminish the overall book.  And I do want to convey how extraordinarily fast the pace is for a mere 308 pages.  There really isn’t time for a reader to consider whether the author has adequately followed a plotline, or if the worldbuilding is acceptable, or if the characters are shallow or believable.  But I think that if the reader feels catapulted through the book and shat out the other end, then the author did her job well.  For the record, I do think she did all that and performed a mighty storytelling. And did I mention that along with the drama and pathos, it’s damned hilarious. ~~  Catherine Book

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