2014 science fiction, fourth in the Chronicles of St Mary's series.
Dr Madeline Maxwell is dead, and that's not even the hardest problem
she's got to deal with.
Well, clearly this isn't the place to start the series, because
Max's backstory only has any emotional weight if you were there for
some of it. The "big" story that carries on between books deals with
adjustments on both sides as Max deals with people who look just like
the people she knew, but aren't, because they've had slightly
different lives. (Time travel…)
‘Do you remember when John Calvin called you the devil's strumpet
and tried to have you run out of town?’
‘No,’ I said, regretfully, ‘that didn't happen to me, but Isaac
Newton did once try to have me indicted for stealing his mirror. And
it was my bloody mirror in the first place.’
The small-scale stuff maintains the episodic nature of previous
volumes, though there's a bit more sense of pacing and climax than
before. All right, Max does still unquestioningly believe a known
enemy who has an obvious motive for lying to her, but I at least
started to feel that this might be because she was under a lot of
stress at the time rather than because it was what the soap-opera plot
needed to happen.
I enjoyed book 1, but 2 and 3 seemed pretty rough; this one's rather
better. I even find myself vaguely enthusiastic about reading another
one, perhaps sooner than the 18 months since I read book 3.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.