A Symphony of Echoes
Jodi Taylor
Night Shade Books
Hardcover $24.95
Trade Paper $12.99
Ebook $3.99

I’d like to thank Brianna Scharfenberg of Night Shade Books for not only providing me with the review copy but also introducing me to this series. It’s become one of my favorites.

A Symphony of Echoes takes up pretty soon after the ending of Just One Damned Thing After Another (reviewed here).

Things haven’t slowed down.  Early in the book, Madeline Maxwell and her associates end up going to the future to save St. Mary’s from an attack.  This is highly irregular, and by highly irregular, I mean Not Done At All.  You never go to the future.  Too many risks.

But these are unusual times, no pun intended.  Max ends up being the director for a while.  I’m not sure how far in the future they go.  It doesn’t seem to be too far, but none of the people there are members of Max’s version of St. Mary’s except Mrs. Partridge, the assistant to the director.  The implication is that they are all dead.

Anyway, one of the funniest scenes in the book is when Max takes a group of trainees on a team building exercise: the team that catches the most live dodos wins.  None of the teams are capable of finding and capturing a dodo, even if the dodos walk up to them.  Which they don’t.  They walk up to Max and Mrs. Partridge, who are having a formal tea on the lawn outside the pod while they wait for the teams.  The whole scene reminded me of Howard Waldrop’s classic short story, “The Ugly Chickens”.

Lest you think things are all fun and games, the next mission the trainees go on is to witness the assassination of Thomas a Beckett.  That was pretty grim.

I’m not giving away any surprises, because both of the things I’ve described above happen fairly early in the book and serve to set up some later events.  And that’s not the only assassination Max witnesses.  (Did you know that many modern scholars think the Hanging Gardens of Babylon weren’t really in Babylon, but in Ninevah? I didn’t. And yes, that relates to another assassination.)

A Symphony of Echoes is just as enjoyable as Just One Damned Thing After Another.  The humor is just as funny.  The overall tone, however, I thought was a bit darker than the first volume.  But when you make your living watching things in history that are pretty dark, such as the opening chapters in which Max and another historian are stalking Jack the Ripper only to end up being hunted by him, things are going to be a little grim.  The Jack the Ripper sequence was pretty nerve wracking, and Jack doesn’t turn out to be who might think.

I heartily recommend The Chronicles of St. Mary’s.  This is a fun series of books, one of the few that can make me laugh and/or cry while piquing my curiosity about history,which truth be told isn’t that hard to do.  Making me laugh or cry, though, that takes real skill.  As long as Ms. Taylor continues to write like this, I’m going to be reading these books.