Timecaster

Fun SciFi

Honestly, if I had realized from the start that the author was the same guy who writes the Jack Daniels crime series, I wouldn't have bothered, despite the fact that the book was free. I read one of those books years ago and found it profoundly annoying. By the time I did put those facts together, I was well into the book.

As other reviewers have pointed out, this is male wish-fulfillment fantasy disguised as science fiction. The protagonist is handsome, he excels at everything he tries to do, and he is married to an incredibly beautiful, sexually talented woman. He is able to pull off amazing feats of athleticism, doing very difficult things he has never tried before when exhausted and injured while being pursued by law enforcement. These stunts quickly passed beyond my ability to suspend disbelief, becoming merely ridiculous.

To make matters worse, he is a jealous, possessive asshole. He met his wife through her work as a prostitute (there's a different term for it in the book, and it is wholly legal, but she has sex with men by appointment for money). Obviously he knew what her work entailed before he got personally involved with her. He was a client! But he is absolutely enraged by any reminder of what she does, trying repeatedly to get her to leave her work, which apparently provides the majority of the couple's income. To be fair, his behavior does have negative consequences, but I found it ridiculous to imagine that the woman would have considered even dating, much less marrying, such a closed-minded jerk.

That and the other women who make brief appearances just reinforced my opinion that Konrath/Kimball cannot write female characters to save his life.

I'm not even starting in on the TWO gratuitous rape scenes, which make it clear that the man has absolutely no comprehension of the horror that is rape.