Time Clocks (Roundfire Books)
by Yoav Avni
After he embarrassed his employer on a popular Israeli TV show, high-end computer programmer Boaz is let go at the company where he had spent years developing FocalAI, which nation loved because they thought it was rattling off prophecies via cryptic limericks. He’s fired. He still has a few months of severance pay, and the use of the company car, but he loses everything about a job he loved–right when they were about to do a huge upgrade that was the pinnacle of his career. He’s in shock, and his girlfriend does not take his firing well, either.
By nightfall, in a desolate industrial zone outside his office, three very odd strangers appear. If they are to be believed, one is an amnesiac policewoman from 1985, one is a dapper and suave man from 1880s Paris, and the third is a huge shepherd from biblical times, clad in armor and speaking ancient Hebrew. He checks their stories and they seem genuine. But why are they here? Why now and why him?
FocalAI helps Boaz discover how they came to our time, and how our time is now in peril due to the man who took over Boaz’s job. It’s a wild ride, a mystery with in a mystery, a high-tech thriller: historical and yet very grounded in our era. Great characters and surprises build to an unexpected resolution (quite a few of them, actually.) This was a fun book that kept me guessing!
— Wendy S. Delmater