Rating: 4 out of 5 stars:
He’d had sex with a ghost, and nothing in his life had ever felt more real.
Reegan McNamara is from the year 2145. He’s a time travel guide with a bit of an addiction to the jaunts. When he gets the chance to go back to 2020 and see a man he considers a hero give a speech, he jumps at it. Everything starts out fine, but when one of the woman purposefully slips from the group, he finds himself in a whole lot of trouble.
Risking life and limb, Reegan heads back to 2020 after getting the other travelers back safely. Each minute he’s there the risk grows as he begins to cause ripples in the continuum of time. He needs help, and fast. That’s when he turns to cop turned P.I. Saul Kildare, a man with many demons of his own. They’re in a race against time, and Reegan needs to find Silvia before it’s too late for both of them. He just never expects to find love in the past, or the pain that comes with knowing they have no future.
This is what you need to understand. Your past isn’t a string of bad choices. Your mistakes don’t weaken you. And a person doesn’t have to save thousands of people to be a hero. He can save two. Or one. He can save himself, and that might be the hardest, bravest task of all.
I’m not typically a time travel fan, granted I haven’t read much of it. I feel like the plot can go cheesy far too easily, but I was pleasantly surprised by this. There was a sense of adventure mixed with heat and a dash of world building. It was a fun ride, enjoyable.
I felt for Saul and the author did a great job of projecting the pain that he associated with alcohol and being around it. I’d get the same feelings in the bit of my stomach that she conveyed for him, and it made me ache for him. The situation with his sister was also salient, though perhaps not as much as the alcoholism.
Reegan on the other hand wasn’t as easy for me to connect to on a personal level, but I did appreciate his sense of adventure and humor. It was so interesting to see him in the past (or, well, future for me), and how marveled he was by the simplest of inventions, or how puzzled he was by the lack of voice commands. It was charming and sweet.
The secondary characters, such as Silvia and Cammie, were also really nice. Two strong females fighting to survive, each in their own way. I appreciated that and how the author didn’t make Silvia out to be a complete victim. She still fought for herself.
I love the futuristic world that Libby Drew created, and I’d actually love to see more of that in her stories. She threw in some great plot points and it’d be interesting to see her do a series of books that stretch across that development of time and some of the historical events she points out here.
Overall, a nice story that kept my interest.
While I’m not a big fan of the colors of fonts on the cover, it does manage to do a nice job of conveying the futuristic and scientific theme that underlies this book.
Sales Links: Carina Press All Romance (ARe) Amazon 
Book Details:
ebook, 228 pages
Published January 27th 2014 by Carina Press
original titleParadox Lost
ISBN139781426897832
edition languageEnglish
Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words 