I’ve been demoted along with my new companion to the mysterious Cleaners. (Said companion’s name is Zuri ‘Zudge’ Jaiden and she’s short, savvy, and subversive – I like her). Sent on a training mission to Ipswich, England in 1984, our mission has been to foil time assassins hired to kill the bass player of a rock group called Kiss.

That isn’t the problem.

With Time Dogz Inc. under attack from its competitors, the Cleaners are now using the ‘Kill Box’ to make our jumps, an experimental time machine discarded years ago because of its unfortunate habit of making its passengers disappear. Where they go, nobody knows.

That’s not the problem, either. Not the immediate one, at any rate, because there are a stack of other things waiting to kill me first.

The purpose of the Cleaners is to mop up other people’s time messes. Unfortunately, they’ve acquired a new recruit with a psychological condition that makes him intolerant of being told what to do. And that difficult individual might have just disobeyed his orders a little bit at the Kiss concert.

Consequently, my friends and lovers are now disappearing. Gone. Ripped from the timeline along with the techs I need to operate the time machines to fix my mess.

And that is the problem, but only because I’ve let myself care for people far more than is good for me.

And like an oaf in a fool’s hat, I will risk everything to save them.

Together with my little spitfire, Zudge, an all-American rock goddess, and a decrepit KGB spymaster, I’m off on a desperate mission to the 1970s to save history, headed behind the Iron Curtain for the English People’s Democratic Republic.

Don’t let those Cold War spy thrillers fool you. It’s tough there, back in the EPDR. I already know that not everyone’s going to come back home, and my mistake is going to cost me dearly in ways I could never have imagined.