markk

On the night before crossing the Rubicon, Julius Caesar summons an oracle to discover what the future holds for him. To the astonishment of his aide, Lucius Septimus — the cover identity of Jonathan Travers, a time-traveling observer from the 27th century — the oracle not only warns Caesar of his forthcoming assassination but names the men involved. Fearing that he has stumbled across an attempt by agents of a parallel universe to create a temporal disruption, Travers contacts his superiors in the future. Soon the crack Time Commandos of the First Division — Lucas Priest, Finn Delaney, and Andre Cross — are sent back to ensure that events proceed as needed. But with a rogue colleague, a temporal criminal, and a group of time terrorists involved, the situation threatens to spiral out of control — taking all of history with it.

The penultimate volume of Simon Hawke’s Timewars series contains nearly every element familiar to readers of the earlier books in it. Once again the Time Commandos go charging into the past, where they socialize with the great figures of the era while resolving whatever emergency required addressing. Unlike nearly all of the previous volumes, there are no characters inserted from famous works of literature, just the major personalities of Caesar’s time. Yet while an entertaining enough read, the pacing is marred by Hawke's all-too-frequent resort to information dumps throughout the narrative. Though the amount of Hawke’s background research is impressive (even if none of it alerted him to the fact that the title of imperator in the Republican era didn't make Caesar an emperor), here it's employed far too often to pad out a thin story. Perhaps this reflects a certain boredom on Hawke's part with the series, which, if true, was unfortunate given how many rich possibilities remained untapped by the end of it.