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THE FUTURE IS THE PAST. AND THE PAST IS UNDER SIEGE. The architecture of Time itself is threatened and only Mr. Z.'s shrewd powers of observation, keenness for cosmic lore and psi-powered courage can avert irreversible, destiny-shattering, world-destroying calamity. Welcome to TIME CRIME, a science fiction thriller featuring an irregular, mythologically astute scholar and his inexperienced yet alluring protégé leading double lives as academics and time traveling detectives in a far-future Earth. Together they thwart abduction, galactic annihilation, the clash of cultures and a crime against Time via adventures in Queens, the Swiss academic enclave of Eranos and nineteenth century Egypt.
Synopsis: Mr. Z. and Vixy respond to a red-level summons at Time Detective Headquarters in Queens only to discover they're being tailed by a far-flung initiate of the mysterious Mothman realm - devotees of ancient, Oriental-style divination and the so-called Way, an otherwise inscrutable, occult society rumored to cultivate the most lethal assassins in the cosmos.
In the fallout of a botched assassination attempt against world-renowned comparative mythologist, psi adept and I CHING scholar Hannelore Wilhelm, PhD, Vixy is kidnapped, vanishing into a perilous void of space-time and provoking Mr. Z. and the Time Detective Contingent into investigative overdrive to find her. Mysterious oracular revelations, an ominous supernatural encounter and Mr. Z.'s Egyptological insights unveil evidence of malignant cosmo-political sedition and provocative yet unwieldy clues to Vixy's whereabouts.
Five, a Moleman engineer cadet struggling to embody his fraught heritage and the dubiously altruistic imperatives of his technologically unmatched, steadfastly secular culture is surreptitiously deployed to the Giza Plateau in 1881 Egypt to re-initiate the engineering of the golden ball - the inaugural component of the Cosmic Clock Project, a cosmos-wide space-time supremacy plot that demands the stilling of the Earth and the destruction of the planet's population.
Unholy alliances, murder, mystery and the vagaries of fate conspire to bring Vixy and Five face-to-face in the shadow of the Pyramids where the mole-man experiences a traumatic psychological schism - a Jungian-style enantiodromia - goes rogue and intentionally sabotages his own mission, sacrificing himself to an awakened humanity he can't fathom, doomed to exile, on the run.
Meanwhile, Mr. Z. risks all, plunging heedlessly into the past to rescue the beleaguered Vixy, she herself clinging to hope and fighting to decipher the magnitude of the unfolding time crime, her fate hinged to that of the Earth itself - to the technological horror awakened within the bowels of the Great Pyramid. Can the cataclysm be averted? Can they ever get home? Book One in a forthcoming series.
About the author
Carnegie Olson is a novelist and an independent scholar of comparative mythology, mythography and the psychology of religion. He lives in Ann Arbor.
