WHITE SILENCE, a suspenseful thriller to give your Disaster Magnet friend

WHITE SILENCE
JODI TAYLOR (Elizabeth Cage #1)
Headline Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: "I don't know who I am. I don't know what I am."

Elizabeth Cage is a child when she discovers that there are things in this world that only she can see. But she doesn’t want to see them and she definitely doesn’t want them to see her.

What is a curse to Elizabeth is a gift to others – a very valuable gift they want to control.

When her husband dies, Elizabeth’s world descends into a nightmare. But as she tries to piece her life back together, she discovers that not everything is as it seems.

Alone in a strange and frightening world, she’s a vulnerable target to forces beyond her control.

And she knows that she can’t trust anyone…

White Silence is a twisty supernatural thriller that will have you on the edge of your seat.

My Review: I cannot believe I did it voluntarily. I mean, I'm completely current in Author Taylor's The Chronicles of St Mary's series...eight novels, eleven novellas and stories released...so I can't plead ignorance of her vicious, violent, eviscerating cruelty. I have been reduced to a quivering heap of snot and tears by Author Taylor on more than one occasion. It's not like I didn't buy the book aware of what would happen to me.

In fact I was unable to read a part of the book around 16-17% because it triggered my personal issues around claustrophobia. I solved this by skipping ahead to the next chapter and inferring what happened from what was then going on. It was too much for my frail little fleur of a heart to live through Mrs Cage's horrid experience, and then in the chapter I skipped to there was an equally awful moment of encavmaphobia (google it) when I thought "oh right then, I'm going to close this file and quietly remove the book from my Kindle" but, at the end of the day, left it on there and just didn't read anymore.

Two months passed. I finished a romantic novel, last in a series I've been following despite the absurd and disgusting and overused winking trope that author insists on fouling her books with, when I thought to myself, "Self," I thought, "never in all the history of personkind would Author Taylor have a character *shudder* wink at another character. You are safe, Self, so finish up White Silence at last."

I did. I am so glad. (There was no winking.)

While Elizabeth Cage doesn't have a smooth ride in this book, she does have a fascinating psionic power and the range to use it. She is clearly unmoored by her beloved husband's death. She forms an attachment to a damaged spy that came rather out of nowhere. Her life is turned upside down by several of Author Taylor's trademark dreadful, sadistic maulings of her readers' emotions. I mean characters' arcs, silly me.

There is so much that happens in this book that giving a book report is almost desirable, but I shall refrain because spoilers make people very angry. Suffice to say that each event in the book will have repercussions within seismic shifts atop temporal tsunamis. Absolutely nothing is as it seems, which we know from about the 90% mark on, though the full and devious range of Author Taylor's sadism hasn't come anywhere near to being tested or revealed.

*happy sigh*

So I tell you true, reader, the Disaster Magnet (aka Jodi Taylor follower via the Chronicles of St Mary's) that you love will adore this book. You will get so many bonus points with your Disaster Magnet that you could come out as a 45 supporter or Brexiteer and earn no more than a hurt look and some tutting. And it will guarantee several hours of dead silence as your beloved slurps it down in which you can watch sports or planetary explosion movies or even go out with your buds and get no more than a vague wave and distracted "take your mother with you."

A SECOND CHANCE, The Pause Button on The Chronicles of St Mary's...more please, now please

A SECOND CHANCE (Chronicles of St Mary's #3)
JODI TAYLOR
Accent Press
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now
—AND—
Night Shade Books
$12.99 trade paper, available now!

Rating; 4* of five

The Publisher Says: St Mary’s is back and nothing is going right for Max. Once again, it’s just one damned thing after another.

The action jumps from an encounter with a mirror-stealing Isaac Newton to the bloody battlefield at Agincourt. Discover how a simple fact-finding assignment to witness the ancient and murderous cheese-rolling fertility ceremony in Gloucester can result in CBC – concussion by cheese. The long awaited jump to Bronze Age Troy ends in personal catastrophe for Max and just when it seems things couldn’t get any worse – it’s back to the Cretaceous Period again to confront an old enemy who has nothing to lose.

So, make the tea, grab the chocolate biscuits, settle back and discover exactly why the entire history department has painted itself blue …

**UPDATE**Night Shade Books is issuing the whole series in trade paperback editions!

My Review: History slaps Max and St Mary's around a good bit. Kleio seems to favor the rough love school of affection. She really rides Max and the entire Institute hard this time out.

This is not the final installment of the series, at least it's not if La Taylor has any idea of what's good for her career, and yet this book is about aging, about slowing down, and not least...not at all least...about closure and releasing all that has come before as a means of surviving and also living fully, finally living fully, after carrying and shouldering and dragging the past everywhere one goes.

Max, our PoV character, isn't as young as her paper age suggests. All those months-long missions in the past have racked up the miles and the relative years. This mission, the main one of the book, is the dream of her lifetime: Return to Troy, scope it out, and watch it fall. Now, as we're accustomed to in the previous entries in the series, Max and team are not going to go by the book. We know they're on a major and incalculably valuable mission, but we also know that this is St Mary's and there will be surprises.

Yes indeed there are. Throughout the previous books, we've seen the team break the supposedly inviolable rule about interfering in the course of history, and not get squashed flat by History's revenge. Permaybehaps, then, Kleio is aiming them at certain moments to make alterations? It's a thought...but Max, who discovered a HUGE loophole in the theory of history's inviolability in book one, isn't a trusting soul and prefers her trips not to end in death where avoidable. She will not countenance terrifyingly major infractions of the rules. She pays her worst possible price for this uncharacteristic obedience.

But there is always a compensation for caution, aging people's most frequent urging on the young. Her compensation takes the series in a very surprising and new direction.

Now as book four isn't out yet (sob), let me pause here to bitch about a few things. Kalinda Black is first on my list. She's built up as Max's best friend and we see so little of her as to make her invisible. The least she could do is have a few lines here and there! She's only referred to in books two and three. I think that's very mingy.

The redoubtable Mrs Partridge, deployed strategically throughout the series, has a sister in the first book, Mrs De Winter. She vanishes. Given the sisters' ummm ancestry, there isn't *anything* the author could imagine for her to do in other contexts?

The theme I'm developing is one I suspect has led many an author down the path to Book Bloat. These novels are concise. They are lean. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, is overworded in here. Permaybehaps a wee tidge too much conciseness...there is room, while staying on story-line, to give more time to the second-billed cast. The world Taylor is creating is deliciously dotty, so let's see more of it. The serious points Taylor is making aren't going to suffer. I'm not suggesting she Robert-Jordanize the books! Just give us more side views. After all, Max is head of a department, and can reasonably be expected to need to read reports and interview returning staff...can't we eavesdrop?

The technology issues...recording devices that seem way too bulky and cumbersome not least of them...are actually, I think, handwaved away by the ending of this book. But I'll state a bit of it here: In a time-travel-verse that suggests machines simply won't travel if there is an anomaly present in the device, how do high-tech recorders make it back and forth? There have never been lost recorders? They're hand-held! Since all of this travel is to pre-computer eras, why not have something like Google Glass (only without the frames) emitting microwave signals to the pod's hard drive? No worries about competing signals...a wearable hard drive in case they're unable to make contact (though why that would be is unclear to me)...but hand-held recorders in the kind of violent worlds they're visiting seem to me to be very clunky.

These are all cavils. In the main, by the end of this book, I was so sad to see St Mary's in my rear-view mirror (which reminds me, MORE EDDIE!!) that I shed a few more tears than were actually required. The ending will wring tears from you. As hopeful as beginnings always are, they require endings, and those aren't always easy.

And as a side note, does anyone know someone in the development department of the BBC? Or ITV? This is a *perfect* TV show. Like Sliders only smart.


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THE CHRONICLES OF ST MARY'S #2: A Symphony of Echoes, four more stars!

A SYMPHONY OF ECHOES
JODI TAYLOR (Chronicles of St Mary's #2)
Accent Press
$3.99 Kindle download, available now
—AND—
Night Shade Books
$12.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Book Two in the madcap time-travel series based at the St Mary's Institute of Historical Research that seems to be everyone's cup of tea.

In the second book in the Chronicles of St Mary's series, Max and the team visit Victorian London in search of Jack the Ripper, withess the murder of Archbishop Thomas a Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, and discover that dodos make a grockling noise when eating cucumber sandwiches.

But they must also confront an enemy intent on destroying St Mary's - an enemy willing, if necessary, to destroy History itself to do it.

**UPDATE** Night Shade Books is reissuing the series in trade paperback editions!! At LAST!

My Review: You know how, as you're watching Star Trek in any of its incarnations, you end up wondering pretty darn quick what the heck they keep talking about this Prime Directive for since they seem not to have any intention of following it? Yeah, that. The whole book is that. The St Mary's tea-soppers are set the one really big intervention that will make History match itself. It is a matter of the survival of St Mary's, so we're told, so it's okay to monkey with History. Kleio will approve.

Getting to the magic moment is, however, quite entertaining, and the key discovery made at the end of the first book is called into play very frequently. Pay attention to the details in this book, and I assume you'll want to read it after the delirious romp of #1, because some things are larded in to the chat and background that will cause a veritable street light to go on over your head when you read #3. Which I also assume you'll want to read after the sobering and still very fun events of this book.

So you've read #1, have you? Then read on: The team goes to Mary Queen of Scots' court to fix the gargantuan error in the timeline of Elizabeth Tudor dying at the chopping block instead of Her Scottish Majesty which they discovered upon sneak-peeking the Shakespeare play that the Director coerced from the Bard's pen. It is imperative, for their time to exist at all, that the error be corrected and Mary forced...or so we imagine...to marry Bothwell, which seals her doom. Needless to say, the task is accomplished, but it brought up two issues for me. One I dealt with in the opener. The other is the nagging problem of all time-travel books, to wit the competing and mutually exclusive notions of A History, one divinely ordained way for Kleio to design and her sisters the Fates to weave; the other is the Eastern philosophical and string theory-supported proposition that we live in a many-dimensioned multiverse where all things that can happen have happened are happening will happen. (English is a titanically flexible tool, and ever willing to bow to Queen Norma Loquendi, but time travel is gonna bugger the prescriptive grammarians HARD. Come to think of it, Douglas Adams mined that vein for some laughs in Hitchhiker's Guide, didn't he.)

It would seem Ma Taylor plumped for the "One True History" solution, based on the events in this book. The Timeline must be restored!

Go with it. Even if you don't think that's the case, go with it. I promise you it will pay off.

And why the hell should dodos say "grockle"? Well, why the hell not.


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THE CHRONICLES OF ST MARY'S #1...FREE...so what are you waiting for?!

JUST ONE DAMNED THING AFTER ANOTHER
JODI TAYLOR(The Chronicles of St Mary's #1)
Accent Press
Kindle edition FREE, available now
—AND—
Night Shade Books
$12.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: “History is just one damned thing after another” - Arnold Toynbee

A mapcap new slant on history that seems to be everyone's cup of tea...

Behind the seemingly innocuous façade of St Mary's, a different kind of historical research is taking place. They don't do 'time-travel' - they 'investigate major historical events in contemporary time'. Maintaining the appearance of harmless eccentrics is not always within their power - especially given their propensity for causing loud explosions when things get too quiet.

Meet the disaster-magnets of St Mary's Institute of Historical Research as they ricochet around History. Their aim is to observe and document - to try and find the answers to many of History's unanswered questions...and not to die in the process.

But one wrong move and History will fight back - to the death. And, as they soon discover - it's not just History they're fighting.

Follow the catastrophe curve from eleventh-century London to World War I, and from the Cretaceous Period to the destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria. For wherever Historians go, chaos is sure to follow in their wake...

A story of history, time travel, love, friendship and tea. Meet the disaster-magnets at the St Mary's Institute of Historical Research as they ricochet around history, observing, documenting, drinking tea and, if possible, not dying. Follow the catastrophe-curve from eleventh-century London to World War I, and from the Cretaceous Period to the destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria. Discover History – The New Sex.

**UPDATE** Night Shade Books is reissuing the series in trade paperback editions! AT LAST!

My Review: With a healthy dollop of the Old Sex tossed (!) in for good measure.

Addictive.

Crack-level addictive. This book was free (still is, last I looked) on Amazon for the Kindle. I've gently recommended (stop laughing) that others would do well to avail themselves of the free goodness. I slurped it up in one long day. Because, well, how does one not fall under the spell of a short, buxom, foul-mouthed redhead whose purpose in life is to cock a snook at Authority and go about the business of making the Cretaceous safe for Dinosaurkind despite the fact that we all know how it ends for them?

While, not incidentally, nourishing a serious and well-requited pash for a dark-haired omnicompetent quiet dynamo of a man, fighting most satisfactorily against the evil-hearted plotting of a seriously tall and elegant femme fatale (in the best and most literal senses of that term) and battling to save THE LIBRARY AT ALEXANDRIA!!!!!!

And so much more!

Does anyone remember the Paratime series by H. Beam Piper? Darn good fun, similar in nature to this series in that the Paratime Police dash about trying to maintain the intended course of History. The difference is that this series assumes there is One History, as opposed to Paratime's many many historys in a multiverse. Both have their strong points, from a narrative structural angle, and their weaknesses.

Knowing how pantiwadulous so very many people become at the merest whiff of a spoiler ::eyeroll::, I will say that Taylor's History has a very...personal...stake in the Universe. Go find out fer yer darnself!

Now. Nothing is flawless. No book is absent goofs, errors, infelicities. This one is no exception. The only one I feel it necessary to mention in this context is that age-old problem of time travel stories, getting it all to hang together. Several characters are set up with a specific backstory that, to the reader, would lead them to know of their own personal knowledge certain other characters. Yet they don't. But they do know other things that fit within the backstory. That's an oops moment.

The others, merest minor gaffe-lets. Punctuation spacing errors, the odd repeated word, blah blah blah. Nothing that merits more than a grunt of annoyance. And each of those is measured against several laughs, a few giggles, a large number of grins, and the odd sniffleback at moments of sentiment. The less disciplined will shed a tear or two, or stand accused of heartlessness.

In short: Excellent fun for the reader in need of fun, thrills, and a larger sense of significance that can easily be ignored if the mood is light. Free. Now, what on earth are you waiting for? Free! Go! GO!


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