“Okay,” she agreed, turning her eyes to the valley, lost in a blue haze of morning mist. “I don’t know about you, but my life has ceased to have linear chronology.”

This is the book I’m so proud of — the first book I borrowed electronically from the public library for my Kindle, thus dragging myself, kicking and screaming, into the 21st Century. The Spirit Well by Stephen Lawhead, third in his ongoing Bright Empires series. I’ve enjoyed the previous books, and I enjoyed this one, once I’d acclimated myself to it. Which is a bit of a challenge. It’s hard enough picking up a sequel to a book you read a year ago; it’s worse when the book purposely messes with time lines and has a large (and growing) cast of characters.

The central character of the series is Kit Livingstone, who was initiated by his late uncle into the art of jumping around in space and time (and alternate universes) through the use of “ley lines” – geographical locations that focus cosmic forces (or something like that). There are also the adventures of his former girlfriend Mina, who got stranded in 16th Century Prague but did quite well for herself, thank you very much, as well as various descendants of Arthur Flinders-Petrie, an archaeologist who had a map of the ley lines tattooed onto his torso, which is now preserved in what is called the Skin Map, for which good guys and bad guys are desperately searching.

Good stuff. I’m not sure whether I recommend reading these books now, though, or waiting for all five to be published so you can read them in a string and reduce continuity difficulties. Whatever you do, read them in sequence.

I note that Lawhead includes several positive Roman Catholic characters here, so he seems to have gotten over the contemptuous anti-Catholicism that was apparent in some of his earlier books. I also noted, with surprise, some problems in word choice – at one point he uses the word “approbation” to mean the opposite of what it really means. He also has a male character speak of “humankind” rather than “mankind” in a scene in the early 20th Century. This isn’t impossible, but it seems anachronistic.

Still, good stuff, and I think Lawhead is better in this sort of genre than in epic fantasy. Recommended.