The Quantum Curators and the Fabergé Egg by Eva St. JohnMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Imagine a world when the African nations rose up against the Romans when they burned the Library at Alexandria and drove them all the way back to Italy. Where peace and harmony are valued, and nations work together to eliminate disease and poverty. This is the Alpha Earth, as opposed to the Earth we know, which is the Beta Earth.
Neith Salah is an Egyptian Quantum Curator, she and her team go to the Beta Earth (travelling back in time as necessary) to rescue priceless art before it is lost or destroyed, they bring it back to Alpha where it is catalogued, holographically recorded and stored in hermetically sealed archives. But anyone on Alpha can have a perfect copy of the artifact in their own homes.
On Beta Earth Charles Bradshaw, a freelance art retriever for several museums, acquires part of a Russian matryoshka set of dolls from an elderly Polish woman which were separated and sealed decades ago. When he succeeds in opening the set he has, the smallest doll contains a note saying the largest doll contains the egg. Could he be on the trail of a Faberge Egg? Charlie enlists his best friend Julius Strathclyde, a Cambridge academic, to research the woman's family and try to locate the missing doll.
When the Quantum Field alerts the Quantum Curators that a lost Faberge Egg is about to surface in present-day Beta Earth, and be destroyed, Neith and her team-mate Clio, together with her best friend Ramin and his team-mate Paul are assigned to retrieve the Egg, even though they currently have no intelligence as to where it is or who has it - cue lots of research. But when the team identify Charlie it seems they are not alone, there are mysterious men following Charlie, are they Russian Mafia? Or less-scrupulous art collectors? Could they be rival Quantum Curators? Before any of those questions can be answered Charlie is killed and Julius may be the only person who can decipher where Charlie hid the egg.
I enjoyed this; it was a light-hearted alt-universe time-travel romp (albeit there wasn't very much time travel). My only criticism was that it ended rather abruptly, almost like a cliff-hanger.
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