futurista

If you could travel back in time and change one single, horrible event in history that could redeem the tarnished name of humankind by preventing tens of millions of deaths, what would it be? Jake thinks he knows because the universe seems to be pushing him toward it. First, he receives his grandfather's journal in the mail, and then he receives a call from the CIA that they've found a technologically advanced vessel underwater that might possibly be a time travel machine. And, when he arrives to investigate the strange underwater curiosity, everything seems to point toward a plan for him to help his grandfather ... you guessed it ... kill Hitler. And, in the process, he'd hopefully also save family members and better his own life and humanity as a result.

Yes, it's been done before. Everybody wants to travel back in time to kill Hitler. But, honestly, what other action could you take in the past that would positively affect so many people ... other than perhaps eradicating mosquitoes which I read are responsible for about half of all deaths in human history? And, let's face it, a fumigation time travel novel just wouldn't be as interesting. Hitler (not mosquitoes after all) stands for what is still the worst part of humanity: the ability of people to look the other way or to even act like monsters in the name of fear. This is a problem that is still alive and well today (the current Sandusky scandal as case in point). So if there's anything that would prove to an advanced civilization spying on humanity that we're not a fellow advanced civilization and that there is still the potential for humanity to commit great atrocities, it would be the horrors of World War II that would make the case against us.

I have to admit that I wasn't sure what I'd find when I began to read since there were no reviews yet written on amazon.com or GoodReads and one of the authors had asked me to read it. However, once I started the book, I knew in the first page that I'd have a hard time putting it down. In fact, I read it in a couple of sittings. It is well plotted, interesting, the main characters are well-developed, and it reads like an action/suspense novel. I had just finished Stephen King's time travel novel, and it was easily able to compete with it on the level of how compulsive a read it was.

I have to admit that I got bogged down a bit in the ending, and it's the ending that knocked it from 5 to 4 stars for me. Some characters that I didn't notice in the main part of the book turned out to be very important characters ... and I had no idea what Jake's past dealings with them had been. I needed a brief recap that just wasn't there. However, I have to admit that I'm a lazy reader and depend on such things sometimes, so it's probably my fault that I got bogged down in the end. Also, the ending is a little more supernatural than my tastes normally run. I'm sure others will enjoy it just fine. And I do like the nods to a Prometheus-esque plot. Also, everything is tied up nicely and happily at the end.

I do find myself wanting to recommend this book to lovers of time travel novels. It's definitely worth a read and is nicely written. The Kindle version is available for a mere $2.99.