The Paradox Hotel

Many of us have been time travelers, flying through several time zones and then adjusting our obstinate internal clocks. It's called jet lag and it can wreak havoc on our alertness and energy. Now, imagine that a couple of geniuses have invented a way to move not just a day in time, but millennia! Imagine the "jet" lag that might affect the frequent traveler in those conditions. That's what Rob Hart has done in his latest story, The Paradox Hotel.

January Cole is a security agent who has been dealing with such lag on a fairly continuous basis since the invention of the Einstein Intercentury Timeport. She has hunted down the events and people involved when they disrupt the standard timeline and she has worked to restore it. This has had show more an additive affect on January's psyche and she is becoming Unstuck, slipping at random into past events and maybe future ones as well, though traveling to the future is not possible, theoretically - Schrödinger's cat, quantum theory, etc. This deleterious effect is a known phenomenon, delineated into stages, and January is aware that she is nearing the third and final stage when her brain will totally short-circuit and she will fall into a coma, lasting until she dies.

January has opportunities to leave her current position as chief of security at the Paradox Hotel, the nearby stopping off point for travelers about to embark on a time trip, but she really does not want to leave the establishment, for the hotel is the only place where she slips back into encounters with her deceased lover, Mena. January's unstable life is livable as long as she can occasionally see Mena, even for a brief moment, but the hotel is being privatized and put up for sale. It is prepping to manage the bidding summit and is in a state of high commotion, continuing to host multitudes of finicky well-healed travelers and welcoming the onslaught of the richest people in the world and their entourages to place their bids, while there are increasing delays and cancellations of scheduled journeys at the nearby time portal. Oh, and the big clock hanging in the center of the hotel's lobby has become slightly erratic, the second hand skipping both backward and forward as the day progresses.

The structure of the story, as told through the interactions and thoughts of the protagonist, January, mirrors her perception and mental state - a relatively smooth arc of events and cognition at the start with an occasional short slip, slowly devolving into a kaleidoscope of images and events, rotating through configurations, new facets appearing, some disappearing, all being rearranged, the twist coming more and more often. January cannot just ride the wave and ease through the summit, for there is a potential (how true is something perceived in a slip?) murder to ward off, artifacts from the past illegally appear in the present, the bidders seem to be deceitful and have hidden agendas, and January's own irascible personality is affecting her ability to accurately interpret her own and other's interactions.

The Paradox Hotel would be an interesting and immersive mystery without the notion of time slippage added in, for it has all the standard details of a police procedural - murder, theft, powerful and deceitful suspects and an experienced but broken detective. When the story slips, between sentences, from a present circumstance to another, it is not immediately clear to the reader that this isn't the arrow of time moving forward to the next event. To the reader, it is the next event in the story, but to January, it might be that the next thing happening to her is a reliving of a past event. Confusion builds in the mystery as clues appear in different timelines and the real timelines of murders and thefts must be determined in order to identify the guilty individuals. This makes for an intriguing mystery, difficult for the reader and life-changing for January.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. show less

WARNING: The following prologue is filled with Broad Sweeping Generalizations, to which there are surely exceptions.

It's hard to combine murder mystery and SF, because the genres are working at cross-purposes. Mystery readers, somewhat counterintuitively, are seeking comfort and relief, the relaxing sigh that comes when order has been restored to a world in chaos. They're looking for a familiar world, in part because the world needs to be familiar if they're to have a fair shot at solving the mystery. By contrast, SF readers invite chaos and confusion, the intellectual puzzle of making sense of a strange world where even the most basic assumptions about reality might be challenged.

SF asks for constant surprise, world-building that keeps show more evolving and developing, but for a mystery reader, every new development in the basic rules of the world -- especially as you get further into the story -- can feel like cheap deus ex machina, a trick that gives the author an quick and easy solution to the mystery. The SF writer diving into mystery is obliged to lay out the basics of their created world quickly and clearly, so that the reader has a fair shot at playing along and figuring out the solution. That can frustrate the SF reader, who may feel that the story's getting bogged down in mere plot.

Mystery writers read "cozies" and "procedurals," a word implying that if we simply follow the right steps, order will be restored; SF readers read "hard" SF and various flavors of "punk," with its connotations of anti-authoritarian rebellion.

So mixing the two is always going to be a challenge. And in the book at hand, sadly, that challenge has not been met. It has, in fact, been failed in spectacular fashion.

Our protagonist is January Cole, head of security at the Paradox Hotel, which serves the travelers passing through the Einstein Timeport, wealthy vacationers looking forward to a vacation in Shakespeare's England or a jaunt through the Jurassic.

It's a stressful week at the Paradox, because the US government has decided to slash its debt by selling the Timeport and the hotel to a private owner, and the four bidders are arriving for the conference/auction at which the new owner will be chosen.

By all rights, January shouldn't be allowed to stay in her job, but she's hiding from her boss the fact that she's entered the second stage of a syndrome called "being Unstuck," which affects those who spend too much time traveling in the timestream. She's losing her tether to objective time, finding herself popping into moments from her past; those slips are happening more often and lasting longer. January knows that stage 3 isn't far away, and that stage ends with a complete severing of the patient's connection to time; she'll spend the rest of her life in a sort of coma. And now she seems to be having visions of the future, which isn't supposed to happen at all, and among those visions is a dead guy in one of the hotel rooms.

I am doing a certain amount of translation in writing those teaser paragraphs, making the story sound more sensible and coherent than it actually is in Hart's telling of it. The rules of time travel, and of Unstuckness, are muddled; and Hart too often fails to make it clear whether January is describing actual events or things she's seeing in a slip. A certain amount of that ambiguity is to be expected, but Hart overdoes it, and leaves too many moments up in the air when the reader really needs to know what's happening.

I liked some of the characters. January's principal sidekick is an AI drone named Ruby, whose tart personality and refusal to be condescended to as a mere servant provide a welcome jolt of energy.

But on the whole, this is a mess. Not recommended. show less

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An impossible crime. A detective on the edge of madness. The future of time travel at stake.

January Cole’s job just got a whole lot harder.

Not that running security at the Paradox was ever really easy. Nothing’s simple at a hotel where the ultra-wealthy tourists arrive costumed for a dozen different time periods, all eagerly waiting to catch their “flights” to the past.

Or where proximity to the timeport makes the clocks run backward on occasion—and, rumor has it, allows ghosts to stroll the halls.

None of that compares to the corpse in room 526. The one that seems to be both there and not there. The one that somehow only January can see.

On top of that, some very important new guests have show more just checked in. Because the U.S. government is about to privatize time-travel technology—and the world’s most powerful people are on hand to stake their claims.

January is sure the timing isn’t a coincidence. Neither are those “accidents” that start stalking their bidders.

There’s a reason January can glimpse what others can’t. A reason why she’s the only one who can catch a killer who’s operating invisibly and in plain sight, all at once.

But her ability is also destroying her grip on reality—and as her past, present, and future collide, she finds herself confronting not just the hotel’s dark secrets but her own.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Witty, fun dialogue describing a very standard plot. I'm not complainig, I'm explaining. If you like our Unstuck heroine,January Cole, you'll like the whole effort. I liked her; I think most of y'all might as well. If you're not all lemon-puckered about SF, you might already know Author Rob's work from The Warehouse. (Plenty of subtext in that sentence if you know what you're looking for.)

"Unstuck"? Um, well, yeah...it's a time-travel book, featuring some yucky trillionaire types without morals or scruples, who can afford their very own access to time travel:

“There’s this saying, about people who are born on third base and think they hit a triple,” I tell him. “About the way people inherit wealth and power and think that not only did they earn it, but they deserve it. We deal with a different sort in this place. People who were born on third base and think they built the stadium.”

A consequence of developing time travel is that some people come "Unstuck" from their roots in...whatever Time is...hence are "Unstuck." Think The Time Traveler's Wife, or Everything Everywhere All at Once. Like all the best time-travel stories, those and this one are about bigger things, grief, the idea of inequality, the process of identity versus the certainties most of us crave for identity to provide...y'know, Life.

Author Rob digs in, plays it out, makes us care while taking our little teeny Stuck selves through a mad, whirling, loud maelstrom of voices and ideas. January lost Mena, grieves for her, but...what does loss really mean to someone Unstuck? Why is everything everywhere here and why is now all at once? With time crimes to solve, security professional January needs to track everyone and through the everywhere that is the Paradox Hotel...which is being sold in the process of the US Government privatizing the ability to time travel, just to add some more complexity.

And who's the dead guy in room 526 that no one else can see?

All of these are questions January needs to solve/resolve. It's the only focus she has that can override her desperate, raging grief for Mena. And it might keep her employed at the Paradox Hotel.

And alive. All because she's Unstuck, so the only one who *can* do it all.

I don't offer a fifth star because the humor is often bitter, sometimes forced, and always facetious. I resonate with most of it. I love Jodi Taylor's emotionally intense, very funny books; they're happy humor, laughing...sometimes mordantly...together with the story. In Author Rob's work, we stand outside and laugh at things with January. It can feel off-putting. So no fifth star for you.

It's still a really good time for the right mood, the right reader, the right moment. Look into it! show less

I received an advance copy via NetGalley.

The Paradox Hotel is a locked-room murder mystery set in a snowed-in hotel for time travelers. It's a scifi thriller with breathless tension and incredible heart--really, it's an exploration of grief and anger in an utterly innovative way. It's the month of January and I already know this book will be one of my best reads this year.

January is head of security at a hotel where the wealthiest of the wealthy stay before embarking on time travel adventures throughout the past. The American government-run facility is about to go for sale, and tensions are high as the most elite people in the world come together to place their bids. January has her own problems, though. She's Unstuck, meaning her past show more work deploying as a time cop has left her slightly unmoored from the current timeline--not necessarily a bad thing, as her increasingly instability enables her to relive moments with her dead girlfriend. However, when she sees a murdered man that no one else can see--and time begins to skip around for everyone in the hotel, even as heavy snow entraps them all--January realizes there's more at stake than her job or her sanity.

I love a good time travel story, not only for the sheer fun of it, but because I respect the difficulties in writing it. Time travel is tricky to get right because it can end up a snarled, confusing mess. But author Rob Hart--wow. I've never read him before, but he's earned my awe and respect. He plays with so many mystery and scifi genre tropes here and makes them WORK. I mean, he even brings in dinosaurs! There's a straight-up ode to Jurassic Park. Even more, as the action races along, the book explores serious emotional issues around grief, love, and friendship. The hotel staff is like a big found-family for January, even though she treats them terribly in her grief. The ending escalates everything in an action-packed profound way.

This novel is the first one to go on my awards shortlist for books released in 2022. If it's not on everyone's lists, I'll be sorely disappointed. show less

Crap, the LT site went down just as I posted my review and I don't have time to redo it. I thought this was an inventive and entertaining book about the possibility and drawbacks of time travel. January Cole, the protagonist, is a foul-mouthed grouchy lesbian still grieving the death of her lover Mena. A snow storm, a meeting of billionaires, problems with the timeport, some escaped dinosaurs, a dead body only January can see, and the ghost of her lover all combine over the course of a few days. Lots of fun but also an exploration of grief and loss.

The Paradox Hotel is a riff on a classic noir grumpy/cynical detective story, that also has queer people, and dinosaurs, and politicians, and characters to root for that are inherently messy and human. Yes, it's a time travel book, and yes, it's a locked room mystery, and yes, it's great.

Zeller excellently anchors the listener in a novel where the lead can’t trust their own perception and time itself is becoming increasingly unreliable. Years of radiation exposure as an elite time cop left January Cole unstuck in time. Becoming house detective at the Paradox Hotel only increases January’s misanthropy, particularly after she loses her true love Mena. The Paradox Hotel, which accommodates guests of the Einstein Timeport, is hosting a bevy of trillionaires and government big-wigs discussing privatizing time-travel. Simultaneously, a snowstorm has shut down Einstein driving all the tourists back to the hotel adding to the chaos. Zeller nimbly displays January’s temperamental combining sarcastic retorts and aptitude show more for violence with a heartbreaking vulnerability when encountering Mena’s time slip “ghost”. Zeller’s portrayal builds strong connections to January, even as she starts to question if her time damaged brain can be trusted. A dead body visible only to January would seem to prove her unreliable – or perhaps time stuttering. Machinations by various groups in different nows heighten the disorientation. Using pitch, cadence, and unique accents, Zeller creates distinct voices for each member of the Paradox community and the competing factions rooting the story in believable personalities. Interpersonal dynamics, rabid classism, and high-action fight scenes ratchet the drama higher. This discussible thriller will appeal to fans of crime, time travel, conspiracies, and even hapless lovers.

The improved review was published in Booklist on March 15, 2022. show less