Paradox Bound, by Peter Clines

Eli’s willing to admit it: he’s a little obsessed with the mysterious woman he met years ago. Okay, maybe a lot obsessed. But come on, how often do you meet someone who’s driving a hundred-year-old car, clad in Revolutionary-War era clothes, wielding an oddly modified flintlock rifle—someone who pauses just long enough to reveal strange things about you and your world before disappearing in a cloud of gunfire and a squeal of tires? So when the traveler finally reappears in his life, Eli is determined that this time he’s not going to let her go without getting some answers. But his determination soon leads him into a strange, dangerous world and a chase not just across the country but through a hundred years of history—with nothing less than America’s past, present, and future at stake.

I read Paradox Bound in its entirety on a lazy Sunday. I expected to enjoy it since I enjoyed The Fold. Crown was kind enough to send me a hardcover, and it now lives on my shelf next to the aforementioned The Fold. Whereas The Fold seemed to derail from about 50% – 75%, Paradox Bound is brilliantly executed all the way through. I’m not just saying that to be nice. As a writer who also has time travel fiction under my belt, I was pleasantly surprised by a few twists that I did not see coming. If an author can trick me, then they definitely know their writing chops. And the teasers! Oh my, they are wonderful. Just when the antagonists started to become tiresome, Clines switched gears and made me care again. The ending is well thought out, and the fictionalization of real-world people is something I thoroughly enjoy in fiction with a historical slant. Paradox Bound is a five-star read, and I’m glad I had a Sunday to dedicate to reading it.

Peter Clines grew up in the Stephen King fallout zone of Maine and–inspired by comic books, Star Wars, and Saturday morning cartoons–started writing at the age of eight with his first epic novel, Lizard Men From The Center of The Earth(unreleased). He is the writer of countless film articles, several short stories, The Junkie Quatrain, the rarely-read The Eerie Adventures of the Lycanthrope Robinson Crusoe, the poorly-named website Writer on Writing , and an as-yet-undiscovered Dead Sea Scroll. He currently lives and writes somewhere in southern California.

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