I have lots of book genres that I enjoy reading, and sci-fi is one of them! Time travel, fictional technology, mysterious events…what’s not to love? Sure, sometimes the stories can get a little out there and confusing, but as long as there is a line of plausibility, I’m up for it.
I read the first book in this series about a year ago. Extracted sets up the main conflict of the series. In the year 2061, a genius kid built a time machine to save his father’s life, but after jumping into 2111, he finds out the world has been left in utter destruction with no sign of life. It’s decided that they need to extract people from history with a special set of skills—both military and intelligence—so they can figure out what went wrong in the future and fix it. The problem is they don’t want to disrupt history’s timeline further, so they need to choose people who died but whose bodies were never recovered. They decide on three: “Mad” Harry Madden—a WWII legend who is built like a tank; Ben Ryder—an insurance investigator with a brain to make complex connections; and Safa Patel—an elite police officer with impressive combat skills.
The first book, Extracted, really lets the reader get to know the characters and understand the conflict of the story while the second book, Executed, picks up where the last on left off. Now a special force unit—comprised of Alpha, Beta, Charlie, Delta, and Echo—is after the group because they want the time machine. They report back to their mysterious leader “Mother” and are willing to do whatever it takes to find the group and take the time machine. Harry, Safa, and Ben also have other changes: Roland, their previous leader and the person responsible for extracting them, is out and Miri, an old intelligence leader for the military, is now in charge. With Miri’s help—and a lot of time machine practice—Harry, Safa, and Ben are able to save the time machine inventor and his sister (in a previous timeline—after he built the machine but before people started coming after them) so that they can protect the time travel technology from getting into the wrong hands. This book, though it gets a little crazy, is still easy to track and understand because only one group is time traveling while the other is fixed in 2061.
The third book is when it starts to get really wibbly-wobbly (and if you make it this far, trust me, you’ll want to finish the series). In Extinct, Ben, Safa, Harry, and their new recruit Emily have slipped by the special force unit, but Mother is undeterred. She hijacks the time traveling technology and now has a working time machine of her own. Now the two groups are fighting against time and each other to figure out how to stop the other…oh, and how to save the world from destroying in 2111. There’s now three working time machines, lots of jumping here and there in time, and a whole lot of deception.
I really enjoyed the ingenuity of this trilogy (and who doesn’t love a good time traveling book?). The only fault was the coarse language throughout the entire series (this is definitely an adult book), and some sexual references that weren’t explicit but enough to make me not want to pass this on to a high schooler (again, adult book).
If you enjoy some science fiction hilarity, then you should enjoy this series as much as I did.
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