The Paradox Hotel

In the Paradox Hotel, time itself is breaking down. Things are happening out of order, and someone has smuggled in baby dinosaurs. Someone is murdered, and it’s up to the head of security to figure out who did it—of course, the murder hasn’t happened yet because timelines are out of order.

This story is delightfully twisted with quirky details. Stories dealing with time travel are so difficult to get right—but this one does. I loved how the investigation played out in such a nonlinear fashion, yet it all made perfect sense in the end.

Rob Hart’s The Paradox Hotel is bursting at the seams with interesting characters. The hotel of the title serves the needs of wealthy time tourists on their way to and from the nearby Einstein port. Working security is one January Cole. Her only friend an AI drone, January is grieving a lost love and fast succumbing to a time-travel illness that has her becoming unmoored from the present. Things go from bad to worse when she stumbles on a dead body that only she can see—turns out, it’s quite tricky to solve a murder that hasn’t happened yet. Surprisingly poignant,… show more.

At the center of many noir stories is a flawed detective—sometimes they’re depressed, often they have a drinking problem. They’re unreliable, but they are competent—and this tension from a point-of-view character is brought to the fore in The Paradox Hotel, where the protagonist is saddled with the grief of a lost love, a hard edge to her personality, and a condition that has her perception “unstuck” in time. The book uses the science fiction element of time travel to show how that technology might alter one’s memories and experiences (and thus one’s emotions and choices), and in doing so… show more.