A Coin for the Ferryman is a heaping helping of time travel and romance with a side of car chases and nefarious henchmen with guns. But most importantly it’s got Julius Caesar.

In 1999 Nobel winner Andrew Danicek assembles a team of elite scientists and researchers, all sworn to secrecy, for a daring project. Danicek has successfully engineered a time travel machine. He intends to establish its abilities, and demonstrate its usefulness by snatching Julius Caesar right before his betrayal on the Ides of March in 44 BC and transporting him to his lab in modern day Los Angeles.

The predecessors of this time machine allowed the user to dial in a specific time and place in the past and be able to view what happened there. Now, at the start of the book, the latest machine has successfully transported an inanimate object from, and returned it to, the past. The first half of the book takes us through the assembly of the team and the successful transportation of a living being - a dog that had once belonged to the medical doctor on the team.

I found the first half of the book to be a slow build, with lots more backstory than was really necessary to establish the book’s plot points. While the plot does move slowly in the first half, Edwards balances it with her ability to convey her characters and their surroundings. She is skillful at setting mood and painting pictures of the people in her stories.

I found the backstory on the time travel tech to be a bit sketchy. For reasons not fully fleshed out, once Julius Caesar was here in the present there were only two points in time where he could be sent back to the past - once very shortly after he arrived, and once again four days later. For such an important plot point I was disappointed that there wasn’t more to establish why these constraints existed.

Anyway, once Julius Caesar is transported, the pace of the book really takes off. The team had choreographed four days of scientific activity and researcher questioning for the Roman emperor. But Caesar suffers no fools, and quickly establishes his own agenda, escaping from what he perceives to be a kidnapping. He takes Cassandra, the young linguist from the team, with him.

What follows includes mad car chases, a plane ride forced down by bullet holes, and a hideout in, of all places, Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. There Cassandra and Caesar establish a real bond and a romance begins to blossom. Meanwhile the pair are being hunted by the dark suited henchman of the husband of one of the scientists. He’s in debt up to his eyeballs to the Russian Mob, and thinks Caesar is the way out of his problems. (If it’s ever explained why or how having Caesar will solve his problems I missed that part.) The rest of the book is a race against time and the bad guys to get Caesar back to the time machine so he can return to 44 BC at the four day deadline.

When I say the book is a heaping helping, I mean it. In book form it weighs in at 482 pages. In the audiobook version I listened to, it's over 13 hours long. So it’s an investment of your time. But if you can get through the slow build in the first half, and forgive the few plot holes, the second half of the book pays off - it might not be quite Dan-Brown-thriller level, but it is really good.

RATING: Three Stars ⭐⭐⭐

NOTE: I received a review copy of this audiobook from NetGalley and Imbrifex Books. I am voluntarily providing this review. ( )

A Coin for the Ferryman has a great premise - Julius Caesar, plucked out of Ancient Rome by a time machine, just prior to his assassination into modern times. For me, the book did not live up to its promise, though it had its enjoyable moments. It took too long to develop the story, the characters seemed two dimensional, and the plot developments were unbelievable at times. The author clearly knows her classical history and did present it well within the context of the plot.

My thanks to Imbrifex Books and Netgalley for providing a copy of this ARC in exchange for an honest review. ( )

What would Julius Caesar, one of the most famous ancient Romans, think about modern society? A Coin for the Ferryman is a creative and entertaining mingle of Greco-Roman History and science fiction that will delight any fan of both. Pinky swear. But, don’t worry, I will explain further.

The narrative involves nearly a dozen characters whose lives intersect because of the dream and will of one determined scientist. Nobel laureate Andrew Danicek hires an elite team of academics, plus Cassandra, a young woman who can speak Latin, to work on a time travel experiment. But he doesn’t want to just bring anyone into the present from the past. He would like to meet Julius Caesar right before his death in the Ides of March.

The start was slow-paced but enjoyable, with fleshed-out characters and interesting backstories. One of the introductory chapters might feel unnecessary, but everything will make sense in the end. We just have to wait for the bigger picture. And, personally, I really liked to see all the little pieces getting together as the story progressed.

When things were established, it read like an action movie, with plenty of suspense and, more or less after 60% of the book, even the blossom of a romance. Most of the story takes place in 1999 and is set between California and Las Vegas. There’s a lot of different POVs, which I thought it was cool and well-executed. I didn’t dislike any character in particular; Faith seemed insufferable for most of the book, but there are actually a lot of good reasons for it. My favourite chapters were probably the ones that focused on Cassandra and Julius Caesar, especially when they got on an adventure of their own. And, I really have to say it, Caesar was endearing as hell. I loved his cunning side.

About the sci-fi part, I didn’t expect the author to show us all the intricacies of a time travel experiment, but I would have liked to know more about the science behind the project. Despite that, the characters were vividly drawn, as I already have highlighted, and it was a fun adventure. There were enough twists, double-crosses and secret agendas (though I would have liked to know more about Hank Morgan's intentions).

The conundrum about the moral and ethical problems involved in disrupting a life was probably one of the key themes of the story. And I think Caesar's last scenes with Cassandra and the rest of the IDES team give us a lot of food for thought on that matter. But I was also expecting a lot more focus on it. I really wouldn’t mind if Megan Edwards wrote another hundred or two hundred pages.

Thank you to NetGalley and Imbrifex Books for providing me with an eARC in exchange for an honest review. ( )

I struggled to like this book. The premise is interesting: time travel with ancient Roman events. However, the reader was off putting for me. The lack of inflextion and tone in the reading was distracting to the story line. The storyline was incredibly slow building and bounced around making it tough to follow the multiple timelines. I was not a fan. ( )

Do you remember the reviews of Titanic that point out that Jack and Rose were added to give the ship a story line? This book is a lot like that. Cassandra's backstory and her connection to the IDES project are unlikely in the extreme and frankly are unneeded. She could have been an ordinary grad student who happens to be fluent in Latin and Greek there are plenty of them around. Latin is not a dead language. It is said that there are more Latin speakers now than there were in classical times. Between 1989 and 2019 Finland broadcast the daily news in Latin. Beyond Cassandra, all of the other characters have these weird little side stories hooked to them that serve to lengthen the text but not much else. And really, if you were going to give a woman a present would you choose a medallion commemorating a boxing event that had nothing to do with the story? Nah.

I received a review copy of "A Coin for the Ferryman" by Megan Edwards from Imbrifex Books through NetGalley.com. ( )