Myriad

De: Joshua David Bellin

Narrado por: Coleen Marlo

Myriad has been in so many time streams she’s lost count—hiding from her feelings about her brother’s death, she works to prevent crimes from happening but finds herself committing one instead …

Agent Miriam Randle works for LifeTime, a private law enforcement agency that undertakes short-term time travel to erase crimes before they occur. Haunted by the memory of her twin brother’s unsolved murder at the age of six, Miriam thinks of herself as Myriad—an incarnation of the many lives she’s lived in her journeys to rearrange the past.

When a routine assignment goes wrong and Miriam commits a murder she was meant to avert, she is thrown into the midst of a conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of LifeTime. Along with her partner Vax, Miriam flees into the past in an attempt to unravel the truth before LifeTime agents catch up with her.

But then her brother’s killer reappears, twenty years to the day since he first struck. And he’s not through with the twin who survived, not by a long shot.

©2023 Joshua David Bellin (P)2023 Blackstone Publishing

Heartfelt and Complex

As a private cop for a time-traveling 'fix-it' organization, Miriam Randle smokes too much, drinks too much, and has too much forbidden sex with her hunky partner Marty -- and all of it is to help her avoid facing a traumatic event in her childhood that scarred her forever and led her to the work she does now.

On an average job like any other, things go sideways and she's pulled into a multiple-timeline morass in which her past, her well being, and the future of everything are suddenly at risk. To prevail all she has to do is face the trauma that defined her - easier said than done.

More than anything this story reminds me of David Gerrold's THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF. Multiple timelines and multiple versions of the same people with different experiences at different ages commingle in a plot that's half mystery, half family drama, and 100% bizarre. It's tough to find a new way to do time travel, a new way to approach it, but author Joshua David Bellin does so with deft skill. The book hurtles right along and if the astute reader can guess the key revelation about two-thirds of the way through, that's okay because the ride itself is such an entertaining one.

Great Novel and Excellent Performance

The comparisons to Philip K Dick people in the media are making are well founded. Josh Bellin’s imaginative world building and dark twists kept me riveted. The voice, in lighter moments, reminded me of Sue Grafton and Laura Lippman. Miriam resembles Kinsey Millhone or Tess Monoghan, the scrappy sleuth in the smallish American city, only a few decades and time-bending advancements later. Beautifully read by Coleen Mario.