Just One Damned Thing After Another

St Mary's Institute of Historical Research is attached, loosely, to the University of Thirsk. Its historians do not time travel. They investigate major historical events in contemporary time, a distinction the institute insists on and nobody outside it can hear. Madeleine Maxwell, Max, arrives as a recruit, gets through training, and finds the job has two dangers: history, which does not care to be visited, and the people who want St Mary's shut down.

The method is tonal whiplash, on purpose. The rules are strict — observe and record and do not interfere — and the staff are a shambles from the director down. Where they get sent can be anywhere in history; the institute's remit carries no period in it. The jokes keep going right up to the moment somebody is killed, and then they stop, and the death is allowed to be a death. St Mary's has a casualty rate, and Taylor uses the comic register to make the losses land harder than a solemn book would.

It moves fast and has no interest in explaining how any of it works; the machinery is a given and the book would rather get on with the trip, which will irritate readers who come to science fiction for the mechanism. The other caveat is structural. This is the opening of a series now well past a dozen volumes and it is built that way, opening threads it has no intention of closing here and ending on the assumption of a next one.