2019; 217 pages. Book 1 (out of 9) in the
“Time Travelling Taxman” series. New
Author? : Yes. Genres: Time Travel
Sci-Fi; Multiverses; Humorous Science Fiction.
Overall Rating : 6½*/10.
Meet Alfred Favero, Senior
Analyst for the IRS. He may or may not
be the best agent they have, but he certainly is the most zealous one. Some might also describe him
as conceited, but they’re probably just jealous.
Alfred holds a special scorn
for people who cheat on their taxes, and he’s just been assigned an important
case: to hunt down the executives of a company called Futureprise, which specializes in some murkily-defined sort of speculative venture. Whatever they’re into, it doesn’t matter, the IRS
suspects them of underreporting their taxes, and now the whole company – from
CEO to bottle-washers, has mysteriously packed up and left town.
The prime IRS target is
Futureprise’s CEO and founder David Garrity, and Alfred is willing to go to the
ends of the Earth to find him and bring him to justice.
That’s mighty noble of you,
Alfred, but the more apropos question is: are you willing to go to the beginning of
Time to bring him in?
What’s To Like...
T-Rexes & Tax
Law is an ambitious effort to combine several of my favorite Science
Fiction subgenres, namely Time-Travel, Multiverses, Anti-Heroes, and Humor;
then tossing in the Tax-Cheat angle, which results in a really unique storyline.
I liked that Alfred is quite a butthead to start out with. The
banter between him and his fellow IRS agent and IT specialist, Nancy Abbot, is witty and entertaining. It was fun to watch
how Alfred’s demeanor mellows and matures in the presence of Nancy. Could he possibly be ever-so-slightly falling in
love? I also enjoyed the fact that the
David Garrity and his Futureprise employees are not simply portrayed as “black
hats”. There are some understandable reasons
for their sudden disappearance.
As the book’s title and cover
image indicate, dinosaurs show up, including the mightiest of them all,
T-Rex. He’s joined by some pterosaurs,
hadrosaurs, and a particularly pesky plesiosaur; and all these were indeed
present in the Cretaceous Period, which is where our time-traveling agents are dumped,
some 67 million years ago.
The Multiverse slant is ambitious as well. Most sci-fi novels
assiduously avoid any chrono-hopping paradoxes (what
if I go back in time and shoot my parents before I was born?); but Rachel
Ford revels in them. Humor in a work of fiction is always a personal
taste, but I liked the way it was done here.
If you hate having to keep track of
dozens of characters in a storyline, then T-Rexes and Tax Law is your kind of
book. The only folks to keep close watch
on are our two IRS protagonists, the CEO of Futureprise, and the company driver, Josh, a hunk about whom Nancy and Alfred have differing
opinions.
The ending is okay, but
nothing special. It resolves the primary
Multiverse conundrum, but it’s not very tense and leaves all sorts of facets
unresolved, such as the superior weaponry of beings from other dimensions. But there’s another eight books
in this series to address all that.
Kewlest New Word ...
Disapprobation (n.) : strong disapproval,
typically on moral grounds.
Ratings…
Amazon: 4.2*/5, based on 129
ratings and 83 reviews.
Goodreads: 3.91*/5,
based on 231 ratings and 67 reviews.
Excerpts...
Alfred’s sleep became uneasy, and he started
and twitched, drawing away from the water.
But the spray continued.
Finally, he woke. He was not at sea, or the victim of churning
waters. On the contrary, his situation
was far, far worse. He was propped in a
chair, with a great, drooling reptile standing over him, slobbering on his face
and arms.
Piercing shrieks split the early morning
stillness. Later, he was glad that the
campus was deserted; those screams, he was sure, would have been audible from
one end of the oasis to the other. (loc. 297)
“What I’m saying is, Alfred, you heard the
words, but you didn’t listen to my point.
You just responded. You didn’t
think about what I was saying. You just
– you always – want to be right.”
“But…I usually am,” he said. It sounded conceited, but he didn’t mean it
that way. On balance, he was right more
often than he was wrong; and it seemed as a general rule simpler and safer to
operate on the assumption that, in a conflict situation, he was in the right.
She was incredulous. “Do you hear yourself?” (loc. 610)
Kindle Details…
T-Rexes & Tax Law currently costs $0.99 at Amazon. The other eight books in the series are all
priced at $3.99 each. Rachel
Ford has several more series for your reading enjoyment, plus a few standalone novels. Those e-books run anywhere from $2.99
to $6.49, with most of them costing $4.99.
If a Mars rover and
Humvee had a love child, this, he thought, is what it would look like.
(loc. 783)
There are some other issues
besides the already-mentioned ho-hum ending in T-Rexes
& Tax Law. In brief:
Dinosaurs may be present, but
they don’t play a big part in the storyline.
The T-Rex scares our heroes, and the plesiosaur rocks the boat, but
that’s about it. Late in the story, a
bunch of them dwelling in our present-day world get rounded-up and time-deported,
and all that easy task is worth is a passing mention.
The book is plagued by
“spellchecker” typos, such as Garrity’s/Garritys,
wroth/wrath, and at least five cases of hanger/hangar. Commas were also frequently misused.
The cussing is not excessive,
but more than I’d expect if the target audience is YA. I counted 12 instances in the first 25% of
the book, including two f-bombs.
Finally, the storyline itself
is not compelling. We start off with a
Time-Traveling tale sprinkled with lots of Humor. Then the humor tails off, and Multiverses
pretty much push the Time-Traveling out of the spotlight. The ending felt rushed, and I was left wondering
if any proofreading, beta-reading, and/or polishing was done before publishing this.
6½ Stars. Despite the technical flaws, T-Rexes & Tax Law still held my interest and kept me turning the pages. I think that says something about Rachel Ford’s writing skills.
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