Traveler's Hotel
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
The wall began to ripple. She felt a jolt, like a low voltage electric current pass through her body then it was over. She shook her head. It was, Shaina decided, time to begin her adventure. She grabbed the handle and pulled hard on the heavy, wooden door. It opened with a groan. Outside, it was overcast. But, it didn’t smell all that bad after all.
At least not at first.
This is how Shaina Brewer arrives at what she thinks is her destination, and is one of the stories in Traveler’s HOT L. The remaining seven stories are accounts of time travel by means of one of Earth’s two Harmonic Overlapping Time Locations. The stories reveal a unique use of the HOT L by a former mental patient, a pair of counterfeiters, a detective, and four other individuals. As the travelers move through time, they try to repair the damage to the time fabric, attempting to use time as the ultimate hiding place, choosing the “other fork in the road,” and righting wrongs.
What happens to ex Army sniper, Roselyn Reynolds, while she plays the video game “Battle for a Far Planet” will leave you in doubt about the wisdom of immersing yourself in an electronic fantasy world. She is just one of eight characters who journey across time in adventures that will forever change them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A rundown hotel hides a HOT L (Harmonious Overlap of Time Location), a nexus for time travel, in a series of stories that lack the execution to deliver on the premise. Debut novelist Downing's conceptual framework is ambitious, sending readers into a medieval historical, two crime stories, and the book's own alternate-universe sequel, but there's nothing new in these familiar settings. PI Phil Mamba tries to catch a murderous politician in his past and inevitably ends up altering the future; no one believes the boy who says that his dolls can speak when, of course, they can. By the time Jesus is referred to as a temporal anomaly, it's all too much, especially given how often explanations of theory and verbose descriptions ("he spoke with tenderness tinged with resignation") slow the narrative. The recurring characters who direct the HOT L lack personality, limited to droll remarks and clich s such as "smooth the now-wrinkled time fabric." Nearly every opportunity to treat these concepts originally has been missed. (BookLife)
