A Coin for the Ferryman by Megan Edwards, narration by Mark Ashby
A Coin for the Ferryman is a heaping helping of time travel and romance with a side of car chases and nefarious henchmen with guns. But most importantly it’s got Julius Caesar.
In 1999 Nobel winner Andrew Danicek assembles a team of elite scientists and researchers, all sworn to secrecy, for a daring project. Danicek has successfully engineered a time travel machine. He intends to establish its abilities, and demonstrate its usefulness by snatching Julius Caesar right before his betrayal on the Ides of March in 44 BC and transporting him to his lab in modern day Los Angeles.
The predecessors of this time machine allowed the user to dial in a specific time and place in the past and be able to view what happened there. Now, at the start of the book, the latest machine has successfully transported an inanimate object from, and returned it to, the past. The first half of the book takes us through the assembly of the team and the successful transportation of a living being - a dog that had once belonged to the medical doctor on the team.
I found the first half of the book to be a slow build, with lots more backstory than was really necessary to establish the book’s plot points. While the plot does move slowly in the first half, Edwards balances it with her ability to convey her characters and their surroundings. She is skillful at setting mood and painting pictures of the people in her stories.
I found the backstory on the time travel tech to be a bit sketchy. For reasons not fully fleshed out, once Julius Caesar was here in the present there were only two points in time where he could be sent back to the past - once very shortly after he arrived, and once again four days later. For such an important plot point I was disappointed that there wasn’t more to establish why these constraints existed.
Anyway, once Julius Caesar is transported, the pace of the book really takes off. The team had choreographed four days of scientific activity and researcher questioning for the Roman emperor. But Caesar suffers no fools, and quickly establishes his own agenda, escaping from what he perceives to be a kidnapping. He takes Cassandra, the young linguist from the team, with him.
What follows includes mad car chases, a plane ride forced down by bullet holes, and a hideout in, of all places, Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. There Cassandra and Caesar establish a real bond and a romance begins to blossom. Meanwhile the pair are being hunted by the dark suited henchman of the husband of one of the scientists. He’s in debt up to his eyeballs to the Russian Mob, and thinks Caesar is the way out of his problems. (If it’s ever explained why or how having Caesar will solve his problems I missed that part.) The rest of the book is a race against time and the bad guys to get Caesar back to the time machine so he can return to 44 BC at the four day deadline.
When I say the book is a heaping helping, I mean it. In book form it weighs in at 540 pages. In the audiobook version I listened to, it's over 13 hours long. So it’s an investment of your time. But if you can get through the slow build in the first half, and forgive the few plot holes, the second half of the book pays off - it might not be quite Dan-Brown-thriller level, but it is really good.
RATING: Three Stars ⭐⭐⭐
NOTE: I received a review copy of this audiobook from NetGalley and Imbrifex Books. I am voluntarily providing this review.
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Title: A Coin for the Ferryman
Author: Megan Edwards
Publisher: Imbrifex Books
Publish Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN-13: 9781945501180
Publisher’s List Price: Not Available Direct from Publisher (offers links to libro.fm, Google Play and others)