"Just in Time" - Review

This was a strange one, Just in Time by Kathryn Shay is a time travel story with romance, mystery, and even a touch of post-apocalyptic earth and space in it.  It’s almost a ‘you name it, it’s in here’, story.  [goodreads review]

Captivating and believable, a great introduction to a series.

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#paranormal #mystery #timetravel

3 Stars!
Series:  Book 1: Portals of Time
Characters: Dorian Masters, Luke Cromwell, and four others
Setting: New York, present day
Mature Themes: Sex, violence, and drugs 

Recommendation: With such a wide variety of themes in this novel a recommendation is hard to do.  If you’re looking for a heavy romance, look elsewhere.  If you’re into time travel, well they don’t really do any, but the future really is integrated into the modern time line perfectly.  Light paranormal aspect, light romance, and a wonderful band of characters make this a really enjoyable, albeit sad at times, read.

Dorian Masters and her two friends have traveled back in time to save one man’s life and to hopefully change their future.  Jess Cromwell is a researcher working on clean energy and his death ultimately leads to the destruction of the planet, granted many, many years down the line.  But when Dorian and Jess team up to save his life, complications arise with the addition of his brother and wife learning of the three stranger’s secret.  Dorian’s story is part one of how they work to save Jess and how one woman from the future learns what love really is.

I’m not sure what I enjoyed more in this story, the characters or the mix of futuristic lingo and gadgets they use.  Dorian, the other two women, Jess and his wife, David and Luke.  Seven characters, all vastly different and yet equally important and well written.  All of them had believable personalities with flaws and benefits, each interacted differently with the other characters and all of them were lovable in their own ways.  All of their motives and desires danced around, commingling with one another, forming this perfect blend of personalities that make up this wonderful narrative.  Truly a great pleasure to read.

As for the other highly enjoyable aspect of the book, the lingo and gadgets, this novel did a great job of giving the reader just enough power to create their own objects.  The futuristic healing device was named, explained briefly, and then left up to me as the reader to fill in the gaps with how it looked, if it made noise, etc.  It was a great way to ease a reader (one who typically doesn’t read novels set in the future) in to the idea of future tech while not backing them into this corner of over description and unbelievability.  There were also a lot of future terms used by the women along with their misuse and attempts to understand modern idioms.  More often than not their mistakes were comical and their explanations of future words and how they morphed from our modern ones were well thought out.

With all of that said, the story was not perfect.  If this was supposed to be a love story between Dorian and Luke, I’d say it fell flat and honestly to go so far as saying Jess and his wife were far more interesting.  Luke was pushy, moody, and honestly a jerk.  Of all of the wonderful characters in the story he was the one I felt was added to even out the sweetness of the others, unfortunately, he’s the one Dorian falls for…