Review: The Good, the Bad and the History

The Good, the Bad and the History by Jodi Taylor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Four and a half stars.

First off, this is book 14 in a series. These books are not standalone. I barely can keep up and I've read all 14 books. Do not start here. There will be spoilers for earlier books.

At the end of the last book an unknown person had shot Commander Treadwell, the Time Police operative acting as Director of St Mary's whilst Dr Bairstow was being held by Martin Gaunt. As a consequence St Mary's is in lockdown whilst various military regimes investigate. Max no longer works for St Mary's instead she is a time traveller bounty hunter with Markham (who is officially on paternity leave), Pennyroyal and Smallhope. Because Max is wanted by various organisations for various things she is masquerading as Nicola Hay, librarian, while she recovers from Insight's attempts to assassinate her. Are you keeping up?

Insight appears to be a benign historical research organisation, however Max and Markham discovered that it was trying to alter the course of history by interfering in moments such as the signing of the Magna Carta. Max has infiltrated Insight and they have foiled three attempts to alter the timeline, but the recent attack means that Insight will soon find out that Max is a spy.

Can Max bring down Insight before she is caught? How far is she willing to go to get in with the real power at Insight? Why are they altering history? And given the need to time travel to the future to work for Insight and back to the past on missions, how is Max going to cope with her time travel sickness?

With all Jodi Taylor's trademark humour, this was a great book in the series, even Clive Ronan makes a brief re-appearance. Could it be the end? Who knows.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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