Taking Time: a Tale of Physics, Lust and Greed by Mike MurpheyMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Started out promising, though without much of a central question to drive the plot; but unraveled in the second half, and only managed an OK ending by taking a couple of dubious shortcuts.
This book, for me, has two major problems. The first is that it's not clear to me what genre it's attempting, but it is clear to me that it's not succeeding in whichever one it is. If it's a thriller, it needs a tighter plot, a clearer goal, and a faster pace, especially in the first half. If it's a comedy, it needs to be funnier, and have more going on than an extended dick joke. If it's serious SF, it needs not to be so absurd; there's an incredibly handwaved explanation of why the time travelers' destinations are distinguishable by the theme songs from old TV shows that play over the tracking equipment when they get there, which makes no sense whatsoever. There's never a satisfactory explanation for the fact that any non-living organic matter catches fire and explodes when the travelers are sent through the equipment, either; that seems to be just a setup to require the travelers to be nude, for (inadequately) comedic purposes. It also doesn't seem to apply to the fillings in their teeth, for example, though it does apply to breast implants (apparently as an excuse to underline that the most attractive female traveler is all natural).
The time travel itself, with the travelers' bodies disappearing although it's really only their minds that are traveling, makes little sense either. And (view spoiler)
The other major problem is that, at several key moments, rather than the (perfectly competent) characters discovering plot-relevant facts by their hard work and cleverness, they discover them by overly convenient coincidence. This is how the ending is achieved, in fact, along with a bit of continuity being forgotten about.
Also, especially early on, the narrative timeline wanders around, dipping suddenly into flashbacks (often without the past perfect tense or past continuous aspect where they should be). I couldn't decide if this was a deliberate (but unsuccessful) attempt to reflect the theme of time travel or if the author just wasn't very good at telling a story in coherent order and using grammatical markers.
There were positives. The relationships between the characters, and their internal struggles, are mostly depicted well. If the author could manage more clarity of focus and more character agency (along the lines set out so well by Jack M. Bickham in Scene & Structure ), he could probably write a good book. But for me, this was not it.
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