A Ripple in Time, Series

Plot. A Ripple in Time starts with a fairly routine passenger plane flight from Miami to Charlotte. Soon, the airplane enters a dark, lightning-filled storm. Upon entering smooth air again, the landscape has completely changed. No cities, no airports, a dead radio. The plane crash-lands in the Atlantic off the coast of Myrtle Beach and only about 30 passengers survive.

The main protagonist is Federal Air Marshal Stephen Mason. He and the survivors are in the early 1700s. Selfish and opportunistic passengers, friendly natives, evil pirates, and decent people aware of the future traverse the pages and carry the reader through the trials and desperate efforts to adapt to this new life ... or get home.

Written by Victor Zugg, nicely narrated by Sean Doyle, all voices male and female are well done, no problem discerning who's talking to who. Bumped the speed up to 1.3, but no real issues with production.

A Ripple in Time series consists of three novels, each in the area of 7 hours of listening. First novel was released in December 2019, The Planters, book 2 in May 2020, and finally The Punishers, book 3 in December 2020 - all by Tantor Audio which, I believe, is owned by Recorded Books.

Early American history and SciFi buffs should enjoy. Recommended.

4 people found this helpful

Irrational characters

The story overall is decent as are the characters. I have two main problems though with the plot. The first is that the characters behave utterly irrationally when it serves to further the plot. The second is the lack of use of future knowledge/technology - something which is even worse in book 3.

Spoiler alert.

Problem 1. The main bad guy is Nathan, the jerk from book 1. Only this time he escalates. He is responsible for kidnapping, attemptive murder, etc. And not just once. But every time they just manage to survive his latest evil plot, the characters welcome him back in with a conversation that is something like:

One of the main characters: "Nathan, how could you? You almost had us all killed and left one of the women to be raped and murdered by pirates."

Nathan: "But I didnt get away with it, did I? And I am one of you since I was in the plane."

One of the main characters: "That's true. You didnt actually get away with it. And you are one of us. Welcome back. But we'll be watching you!"

Rinse and repeat after each evil scheme.

I literally had to shut down the story while I face palmed and only barely managed to get myself to finish it. Its hard to look at the main character, Steven Mason, seriously after this sort of thing. Particularly since he is otherwise so competent and hard to fool.

4 people found this helpful

Time travel story with no time travel...story.

I really don’t know why the author wrote this book. When you read a story about people traveling back in time you’re hoping to see some consequences of these people traveling back in time. The story had almost none of it. This was a story of a group of people traveling back to 1720, buying a rice farm in farming it. This book should have been called “farming a rice farm“. They didn’t take advantage of any future knowledge of the past and only had a very small piece of future technology. Time travel really had almost nothing to do with the story. Just don’t get it I guess.

3 people found this helpful

Great Book

Not sure what some of the other reviews are about, while not Shakespeare I really liked this book and the reader did a good job. The story was captivating and easy to follow and the reader made it easy to distinguish between characters. Over all I thoroughly enjoyed all three books in this series and look forward to more stories by this author. I love a good time travel story and this fit the bill.

1 person found this helpful

Just as wonderful as part 1!

I'm was so amazed at the first book! When I found out that there were more books, I purchased immediately! This is a wonderful addition to part 1 and is written and read wonderfully!

1 person found this helpful

Where's an editor when you need one?

Between the routinely butchered grammar and a narrator tone that had no relationship to what he was reading about 30 percent of the time, the first book was hard to listen to, but the story was good, so I bought the next in the series. This one is worse. I'm glad it's over, and I'll be avoiding this author and narrator in the future.

1 person found this helpful

I love time travel

I won't be listening to the 3rd book. The narrative was fine, but the story got boring about half way through. It became very predictable and the interaction of the characters was less than mediocre. Sorry, but I wish I had my credit back.

Use the damn gun!

Mason is so frustrating with his need to preserve history over his life. Also, how many times does one guy gotta betray you before you toss his body into the ocean?

A great idea with terrible execution

At the very beginning, during the plane crash, and shortly there after, I was very excited about the possibilities of this book. But like a lot of other reviewers I felt the author missed a great opportunity to make this a fabulous story. I was hoping that book 2 would get more interesting, but it disappointed. Like someone else said, the scoundrel Nathan went totally unpunished, and in fact, was almost welcomed back every time he almost killed somebody and ultimately betrayed them. There’s so much more I could say, but I really don’t like trashing someone else’s creative process. I thought the ending of book 2 was about as exciting as an earthworm surfacing out of the ground. What a waste of time and opportunity.

Awesome

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