Shannon Moss is a member of a secret department within the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). Her current case – solve the murder of a Navy SEAL’s family and find the missing SEAL along with his eldest daughter. Shannon Moss can’t tell anyone, but the missing SEAL was an astronaut stationed aboard a spaceship assumed lost on a classified mission. When the Navy SEAL is found murdered, Shannon Moss is determined to find the missing girl and travels in time to the future hoping that sometime in the intervening years, the case is solved and she can find the evidence she needs to unravel the case.
This book was mind-bending. There are twists and turns, time travel, variable future timelines, lots of suspense, and a looming doomsday that keeps getting closer to the present. This book kept me guessing and I’m not entirely sure of what happened at the end. I mean, I think I know what happened, but I’m not 100% certain.
I really liked the way time and time travel is presented in the book:
First of all, the author does a great job of reminding us what year we are in. The main time period the book takes place in is 1997 and the author is always reminding us when we are in 1997 – there is talk of Dolly the cloned sheep, President Clinton is in the news, and the Hale-Bopp comet is on its way.
Second, time travel is not instantaneous where all of a sudden your DeLorean is electrified by lightning and then you’re in the future. In The Gone World, it takes 3 months to travel one way in time because time travel is accomplished by traveling through a worm hole in space. Shannon Moss regularly spends 6 months to a year in the future, so for her, a trip to the future adds 1-2 years to her life even though she leaves and returns at the same moment in time. She is only 27 years old but because she has time traveled so much and spent so much time in the future, she looks more like 40.
Third, I thought it was interesting that as soon as someone travels to the future, it’s like they are removed from the past timeline. For instance, after Shannon Moss travels to the future and runs into people she knew in 1997, they all ask her where she disappeared to.
There’s so much more I could say about this book but that would give away what happens. It’s definitely a book I had to stop and think about to gather my thoughts and I’m still thinking about it even though I finished reading the book a while ago.
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