Reviewed by Dan
TITLE: Time Waits
AUTHOR: C. B. Lewis
PUBLISHER: Dreamspinner Press
LENGTH: 330 Pages
BLURB:
Badly wounded and on the run from his WWII Hungarian brigade, Janos Nagy stumbles through a temporal gateway to the future. Suddenly stranded in Manchester, England, 2041, Janos wants answers about a crazy world he doesn’t recognize.
Dieter Schmidt, flamboyant historian/linguist for the Temporal Research Institution has those answers, but the TRI is a neutral entity, set up to verify historical events under a strict code of noninterference. That doesn’t stop Dieter from taking Janos under his protection. Trust doesn’t come easy to Janos, who came from a time when revealing his secrets could get him killed, but the two men slowly build a tentative friendship with a possibility for more. But Janos’s continued presence in the future and Dieter’s persistence raise questions about the limits of the noninterference policy.
Since the rules have been bent once, one agent sees no reason why he can’t push them further, and he travels back to 1914 to make a few changes of his own. Under Janos’s guidance, Dieter must leap back in time to stop the rogue agent from changing the past and risking everyone’s future—if he can survive history.
REVIEW:
I’ve always been a fan of time travel stories, and this one was no exception. The book bounces back and forth through time, from our past, to our future, and makes both very believable.
Janos Nagy is a soldier in the Hungarian brigade in World War 2. He has been severely wounded and is on the run for a large group of pursuers. When he finds a hole in a bank, he climbs in and covers himself with dirt, escaping the pursuit. But this act also makes him unseen by the Temporal Research Institute when they set their time gate to the exact time and area. Through a series of events, Janos passes through a doorway into another time and place. Into Manchester, England in 2041 to be exact.
Imagine you were thrust approximately 100 years into the future. How would you cope? What if they didn’t speak your language? What if you couldn’t get out of the room you entered and you were holding a gun?
That is the scene that Dieter Schmidt enters. Dieter is a historian/linguist with the Temporal Research Institute. He is a make-up wearing, quite flamboyant young gay man who is watching through the monitor and recognizes Janos for what he must be, a soldier from WW2, and only Dieter speaks even a little Hungarian. Dieter enters the room, and drops to his knees in submission to try to calm down the soldier, but Janos sees him as an overly pretty young man, who looks like a painted whore with all the paint on his face. Dieter is wounded, and very nearly killed by the desperate Janos.
So why when Janos wakes up in a white room, with a strange needle stuck in his hand, does he also find Dieter in the room? What will it mean to them both going forward?
As Janos and Dieter get to know each other, and start to develop a friendship, other things crop up to test them. When another agent for the Temporal Research Institute decides to stop WW1 from happening, it will take both Janos and Dieter’s knowledge to stop a major change to history. When Dieter jumps back, will he survive? Will our timeline be forever changed?
I enjoyed this book. It is well written and well edited, and overall has a very believable storyline. I particularly enjoyed how Ms. Lewis took us in the eras of both World Wars and made us aware of what the fate was for gay men in those times. With the memories of those times, contrasted with the openness in Dieter’s time, is it any wonder that poor Janos is terrified to let anyone know he is gay? I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good time travel story.
RATING: 
BUY LINKS:
thanks for this review. I just won a ebook copy of Time Waits and look forward to read it.
Hope you enjoy it! 🙂