And again, Dr Maxwell is running. Unfortunately she has absolutely no idea what or who is she running from. Having been transported from her own dimension to another, near identical one by the mysterious Mrs Partridge with no explanation as to why, Max is out of her depth, very confused and running for her life. In short, this situation is no different from a normal day in Dr Maxwell’s life.

This is the second St Mary’s instalment that I’ve read and I enjoyed it as much as the previous one. Jodi Taylor has created a dysfunctional, intelligent and highly entertaining character in Dr Madeleine Maxwell and every other character is this series. As a history lover I knew that I would probably these books but I also learn something from each story and that is always a positive thing.

Many thanks to Headline and NetGalley for letting me read this book in exchange for my unbiased review.

Having died and been placed in an alternate universe of sorts, Max is reunited with Leon and looking forward to a peaceful life together. Unfortunately, they don’t even make it past breakfast. On the run from the Forces of Darkness, aka the Time Police, Max and Leon travel from 17th century London to Ancient Egypt to Pompeii, eventually taking refuge at St Mary’s, where the fight against the Time Police comes to a head.

A Trail Through Time has the Chronicles of St Mary’s back on the up. I was quite disappointed with the previous book, but in this one the lighthearted humour and general madness is back. As this story is essentially made up of a chase through time followed by a massive battle, the pace is fast and exciting, with almost non-stop disasters and witty quips.

I’ve always enjoyed Max as a main character, but it was definitely a relief to have her back to being less serious again. Although there are still a couple of darker, more serious themes, the overarching feeling is one of joy and general excitement, which is definitely what I want from this series.

Suffice it to say, A Trail Through Time has restored my faith in Jodi Taylor and the Chronicles of St Mary’s. This series can be very same-y, so a break is definitely needed between books, but I’m looking forward to reading the next one when enough time has passed.

This series continues to be great fun while also exploring deeper themes. And this one ends in a battle at St. Mary's! It is all very exciting stuff, and I can't wait to continue.

Content warning: violence, character death.

This is perhaps the best of the St Mary's books I've read so far. It's exciting, and fun, and has all the snark and adventure that makes the series great, but it also moves away from the episodic nature of previous books, which gives it the time to really grow in complexity and depth. I am wholly invested in Max and Leon's relationship, which is more and more central to their development as characters, and the final third of of this book really made me realise that it's not just them, but the whole of St Mary's that has become real to me. There are moments I laughed so loud I startled my husband, and I definitely shed a tear or two (partly from sadness, partly from pride in these characters). In a way, it almost feels like it wraps up the series, and it would have been a perfectly satisfying stopping point for a quartet - BUT, there are so many more books to come! A delight, as always.

This is one of my favourite series and this installment is the best yet!

~ Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to review this title ~

I'm really enjoying this series, would definitely recommend to anyone who is missing Thursday Next.
Looking forward to the next one.....

I adore this series. It can only be described as pure escapism! The time travel / investigating history concept had me hooked but the fun characters and story development has made me a life long fan! I re-read the whole series every year before the next book comes out!

I really loved the development of this book and I can’t wait to read the entire of this series! Full review up soon!

I received a free ecopy of this book in return for an honest review. Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity.

Having lost the love of her life, Leon Farrell, and herself died a tragic death, Max has been yanked from her own timeline and flung sideways into another where Max died and Leon lived. Dropping into the grieving Leon’s life, the pair immediately hurtle into a series of rapid time travels, trying to escape an organisation called the Time Police. Culminating in a literal battle for survival between St Mary’s and the aforementioned Time Police.

It’s a new timeline and all bets are off. Everything we thought we knew about this world can change. What hasn’t changed is the breakneck pace and dry humour of this series. For Max humour, is a defence mechanism. The horrors she sees in history are matched against the horrors in her own childhood. In this book we finally get a few, just a few details of that childhood. We are also getting some hints that the mysterious Mrs Partridge, has far more extensive powers than previously suspected, and as ever her main weapon is Max.

I never regret picking up a Jodi Taylor book. The plots are unexpected, the characters are relatable and the jokes leave me chuckling to myself. I am so happy that there are many more books in the series. If you like humorous sci-fi fantasy, this is a series you won’t want to pass up.

I think A Trail Through Time might be my favourite book of the St Mary’s series out of the four I’ve now read. The story was by far the most coherent – it even took up the whole of the book! It felt as though there were very real stakes, much more so than in the previous books where it’s the same old villains who always get defeated. And yes, the whole parallel world thing meant that one of them came back and that made me roll my eyes, but on the whole she didn’t have much to do with the whole thing, so I was able to breeze past that.

The reason I can’t bring myself to give even this one more than three stars is, of course, the revolting Leon Farrell. His assault of Max from the previous book is never brought up. And it’s all very well desperately hoping it didn’t happen in this universe, but since neither of them ever mention it I have to assume that Max is assuming it did happen and that she and the author still think it was heartbreaking and romantic. I’m just not here for a world where we are supposed to think that someone beating you and and raping you is something they just can’t help because they’re so upset and bitter. It’s. Never. Ok.

So yeah, I really couldn’t get on board with the whole Max/Leon thing, and since a large portion of the book is just the two of them rushing about history it made it significantly less enjoyable. The rushing about history to get away from the Time Police was great, though, I really enjoyed it. I liked how they gradually puzzled out what was going on (let’s not mention the huge problems that this whole tracker thing cause in previous books… maybe they just don’t have them in the other universe!).

The ending was fine and certainly allowed for some interesting shenanigans in the next few books, so that was probably a good idea. I’m never terribly interested in battles in books – or other media, come to that. Unless you get a really inventive creator, the fact is that no matter how exciting, someone’s going to win and someone’s going to lose, and for the story it’s that which is important. The battle is just how you get there and the individual actions don’t really matter that much most of the time. So for me that went on rather too long and I’ll admit I skimmed through some of it.

After thinking about this for a while, I’ve come to a conclusion on why (despite the Leon stuff) I enjoyed a Trail Through Time more than the previous three books. The reason demonstrates why I probably shouldn’t be reading these books (I’ve got the next one and I have to read and review it because it’s from Netgalley so I have an obligation which is also why I read this one). And it’s all the history stuff.

I find the historical episodes really frustrating. Let’s take the Troy episode from the last book – if you haven’t read that one yet I’m not sure why you’re reading this review but you’d better stop now because I’m going to spoil! We spent quite a long time there, and I assume that the reason was so that we could really get to care about the city and the people who live there – particularly Helios. I didn’t though. Jodi Taylor describes Troy in a fair amount of detail, and she describes what it feels like to be there and some incidents that happen to the St Mary’s team there. Yet, although Helios and his sister (was it?) are mentioned, I never felt I knew them as people; I was never invested in their survival. The other people involved we never meet directly at all, and while this is certainly more accurate, it also means that when Troy fell I… well, I just didn’t care. I never knew any of the people who lived there, so I didn’t care about the place where they lived.

I know a lot of people love the historical episodes, but honestly this is a problem they all have had for me. We spend so much time on them that we lose touch with the St Mary’s crew, yet we never get enough of them to actually care when bad things happen to them. It’s kind of the worst of both worlds. I’m very aware that I’m in the minority here though! Whereas in this book, while we went to various historical periods it was still all about Max (and Leon) and it was so much more satisfactory. There was no ‘let’s pause for several pages-or-even-chapters and observe a historical event and feel [insert emotion] about it and sure there might be some danger for us but only because we’re in a dangerous place, not because any of this is relevant to the actual story’. It’s ‘we’re in Pompeii (or wherever) and in serious danger and everything is literally collapsing around us and we are fighting for our lives in a way that matters to us in our lives and not just because we were stupid enough not to take proper precautions in a dangerous place’.

So much better.

Continuing to blaze through all of Jodi Taylor's St Mary's Books...
Yes there are spoilers here for the first three books.

In the fourth instalment we see Max getting used to life in an alternate universe, similar, yet significantly different from her own. In this one it's Max who died (in a stupid accident) and Leon who was left devastated and alone. Mrs Partridge - PA to the director and part-time Muse of History and Max's rescuer after Agincourt- annoyingly tells Max that she has a job to do but doesn't tell her what it is. She assumes, at first, that it's to rebuild the wreck thet Leon has become, but it becomes apparent that (although sorting out Leon won't hurt) that's not the main task. Max has hardly recovered from dying at Agincourt when the Time Police show up and it becomes obvious that they are an organisation out of control. Fleeing from time to time with the TP barely an hour behind them, Max and Leon barely have the leisure to rebuild anything.

Things gradually clarify and Max realises what she's fighting for... and battle if joined. Max wins the first round with a clever trick that her now dead counterpart in this world couldn't have pulled off, but the biggest battle - for St Mary's itself - is yet to come. Once again, a page-turning read that I devoured in a day and I immediately went on to order some of the short stories and book number five. These are light, easy reads, but not short of bags of dramatic tension and heart-stopping action.

Not my favourite of the series as there's an awful lot of running, escaping, pursuit which means quick jumps in and out of history. But the characters gain some complexity and Taylor's imagination never flags. As ever, the mix of whimsy, bonkersness and real danger works well. Don't think of starting this without having read the first 3 books.

Another wonderful jaunt through history with the formidable St Mary’s crew. This time we find Max alone, vulnerable, injured and scared as she hurtles through time trying to outrun the menacing Time Police. Thwarted at every turn, she must reunite a fractured St Mary’s to fight the ultimate battle to save the future as we know it.

I feel like this is a big turning point in the stories here, and the first definitive move away from the old St Mary’s. It’s almost like a factory reset as Max and Leon need to start over their relationship here, each knowing but not quite understanding the other. I found Leon more loving and warm this time around, as if the events that led him to his ‘reunion’ with Max have mellowed his personality slightly. He’s no less ‘Leon’, just a more refined, complicated character. It was also good to see this more vulnerable side to Max, as she faces up to a life she didn’t ever expect to have. She’s still full of sarcasm and fire, but at times you can feel the struggle with emotions as she reminisces about Peterson, Markham and everyone else that’s been left behind. These are not her people, or her St. Mary’s.

I liked the mix of history, as always, too. It’s a great range this time, going from a London Frost Fair, Ancient Egypt and Pompeii in very quick succession in Max’s attempt to evade capture. There’s a different tone to this novel in the first half, with lots of running, action and almost being eaten by crocodiles with just Leon and Max that I really appreciated. Often on these missions it’s a group and I miss the Leon and Max elements. I also enjoy a good Max and Peterson adventure too, and again I wasn’t disappointed here.

The final battle is exciting, full of misadventure and loss that strikes the right level of panic and mayhem without spilling over into the overdone. As I’ve stated before, I find that Jodi’s writing gets better with each novel, and this is a solid cohesive piece of writing that flows well with a good, defined narrative and timescale.

Great story, as always. I know I can rely on my St Mary’s gang for a good romp through history, and this is no exception.

Another great addition to the series! I am binge reading these thanks to NetGalley and the publisher!
I loved the humour, the characters and the writing style of the author.
It's a great combination of historical, science fiction and mystery elements. If you like time travel books with these aspects, you shouldn't miss this series!

"We were going to die. But we're St Mary's and we weren't dead yet"

* * *
3 / 5

Reading A Trail Through Time was an experience conflicting emotions. On the one hand, I wasn't sure how to feel about the "big twist" that this book is based on, and wasn't entirely sold on it by the end. On the other, Max and Leon seemed a whole lot more mature, which was a relief, and Tim had a fair chunk of page-time, which was great.

"After a disastrous reign, he was overthrown by his wife. Serves him right. What sort of idiot marries a woman known as The She-Wolf of France?"

Fair warning: this review contains spoilers for book number three: A Second Chance. Righto, you have been warned. Max wakes up face-first on the carpet of Leon's house. In another dimension. A dimension in which Max is the one who died and Izzie Barclay is her best friend. There's also this police force called The Time Police, who travel up and down the time line looking for anomalies: people brought out of their own time, people trying to change the past, etc. Leon and Max are on the run for their lives.

Obviously, they flee into the past. Their jumps take us to their own island, to 17th century London and a frozen River Thames, to Akhenaten in Ancient Egypt and to Pompeii. One problem here was that was so little time spent in each place in history. Ancient Egypt is immensely interesting and a personal favourite of mine, with so much potential to be fascinating, but there is scarcely a few pages of Max looking at a temple and being snapped at by crocodiles. I'd have preferred fewer jumps and more exploration, like with Troy in the last book!

"History glitters with the tales of men and women who, with no thought of reward or glory, make their stand and quietly do their duty. I wasn't going to be a lesser person than my ancestors."

A Trail Through Time was definitely fun. Jodi Taylor has a fantastic writing style and she seems to have these books down to a fine art: the great characterisations, the witty quips, and the serious parts. There's a number of touching scenes - I think Dr Bairstow and Tim Peterson in particular are fantastic characters with some good parts in this book. I love the characters and in this book the characters that I love are taken from me. The parallel world has mostly the same people but with slightly tweaked personalities and they lack that connection to Max, their familiarity and their love. It makes those characters - Helen, Kal, Guthrie - feel blank and emotionless. The plus is that Taylor made Leon more mature and palatable for me.

A Trail Through Time takes a chance to be slightly different from the first three. For me, personally, it didn't pay off. Yet there was still much to enjoy in this book.

My thanks to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for an ARC of this book.

The disaster magnets of St Mary's face their greatest trial yet in this instalment. Those who read the previous book will be pleased to learn that Max and Leon's story continues here, however because it's them, the course of true love doesn't run smooth. And in this universe, Max's presence is considered highly suspect. A new regime is in place to stop people just popping up and down the timeline willy nilly - say hello to the time police, and let the great battle of St Mary's commence!

This is an excellent addition to the series. These books are a hilarious and heartwarming combination of whimsy, historical adventure and science fiction. I recommend the whole series and all of Taylor's other books too.