Detective Dana Rohan, our narrator, is a good cop because she has two secrets. One is a strange tattoo, the Mark, on her back. It was there when she was found, six years old, at the site of a double homicide, an event she only learned about after reading some documents after her mother died. The tattoo grew with her as she aged. Rohan’s beloved cop father, who adopted her and was killed in the line of duty, never was able to find any more about her family, and she has no memory of them.

Her second secret is that the Mark enables her to travel back and forth in time and to alternate timelines. That proves very useful in solving crimes as a detective. She can go back in time, find a suspect before the crime, gather evidence about weapons and identity, and return to her normal time with clues for the police to use. She has never told anyone about her Mark and the abilities it gives her.

She likes her partner Jacob Hightower. They’ve been together three years, and he’s always solicitous of her even though she reveals nothing of her personal life. But a couple of things interrupt this status quo.

Rohan comes across a man babbling to her in a foreign language (it turns out to be Old English) and attacked by a knight in steam-powered armor.

And a woman from the US Department of Justice’s Office of Civil Rights Enforcement shows up to investigate Rohan’s excellent record of capturing and convicting minorities, maybe a little too good.

After the attack, Jacob and Rohan grow closer though not intimate, and Rohan confides her Mark and troubled childhood. However, their relationship quickly sours when the improbable facts of two guns, with identical serial numbers, comes to light from one of Rohan’s cases since she brought one over from an alternate timeline.

Then there is the matter of the man in the steam-powered armor. Rohan begins to piece things together after seeing a similar tattoo on his victim. And that knight, Ivan, shows up at her apartment and attacks her. Captured, he tells her a story of thousands of alternate worlds. Those of royal blood and with the Mark can stabilize worlds into remaining fixed and apart from the usual chaotic and short life most worlds have. Those with the Mark are Walkers who can traverse these worlds.

The man Ivan attacked was wanted by the Empire of Napoleon V, “Emperor of Europe, Protector of the Americas, and Sovereign of a Thousand Worlds”. Rohan thinks the man Ivan attacked may be somehow related to her biological family.

Soon enough, Shadows, beings of chaos and rather zombie-like and able to move between the worlds, attack Jacob, Rohan, and the Justice investigator.

Rohan, Jacob, and Ivan end up driving her beloved 2016 Dodge Charger through a series of alternate worlds on the way to Napoleon V’s court in Washington, DC.

On the trip from Cleveland, they briefly pass through some interesting, if only sketched, alternate histories: a world full of Art Deco style official Nazi-like signs, a world hit harder by the Spanish flu than ours, a world where the Armistice ending WWI didn’t happen in November 1918, and one where the Confederacy was not defeated. Rohan and Jacob (mostly Jacob since, conveniently, he’s a history buff) speculate on how these worlds came to be.

At the court of Napoleon V, we learn more about Rohan’s origin and the dynastic power struggles of her biological family in another timeline. The Emperor is even interested in marrying Rohan since the elaborateness of her heritable Mark points to someone with exceptional power in her ability to move between worlds. a power level seen only in royals.

There is a long, climactic fight between Rohan and forces that attack her on the Imperial airship. It goes on way too long with Swann fully exploring the tactics of moving forward and backward in time and through space on a zeppelin.

The romance between Rohan and Jacob is well done, and it wasn’t a bad novel, but, for me, this was a rare miss from Swann.

It ends with a feeling that it may be the start of a series. If so, it’s not one I am interested in reading further installments of. ( )

The start of a new series features a cop that was born with a Mark that allows her to travel back and forth in alternate timelines. This has allowed her to have an amazing conviction rate on the crimes she investigates. It has also allowed her to do some financial trades that has made her life a bit more comfortable even though she lives alone and has no idea about her past. She was adopted by the cop that found her at the age of 6 covered in blood and not knowing English. One night she is accosted by a man clad in rags yelling at her in an unfamiliar language. Before she can do much about it a knight comes out of nowhere and kills him and disappears. Using her skills to try and figure out what happen attracts the knight to her and he attacks her while her partner is at her apartment. With her secret out of the bag with her partner and new information from the knight she finds out she is part of a select few people that have the talent to travel among different realities. As she is trying to digest this new info, they are attacked by zombies coming out of nowhere. She joins forces with the knight and agrees to go back to his world to find out more about herself and what is going on and why these things are attacking her. The book ends not so much on a cliffhanger but certainly is a setup for the next step in her life.

Digital review copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley
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