The Albino’s Secret: The Metatemporal Detective, Book I

This disappointing series launch from Hodder (The Burton & Swinburne series) and sci-fi novelist Moorcock (The Woods of Arcady) doesn’t make the case for a sequel. Sir Seaton Begg and Doctor Taffy Sinclair both work for the British Temporal Service, travelling through time to maintain stability in the present. At the outset, they’re assigned to visit 1930s Istanbul, which has been plagued by a master assassin known as the Red King. They arrive just in time to save an old frenemy, Violet Damm, from one of the Red King’s minions. Violet informs her rescuers that her boss, Sir Vivian Clarke, head of the Secret Service’s Turkish Bureau, is backing the Red King. Begg and Sinclair are puzzled, since they, too, are working for Clarke; they investigate Violet’s claims after Clarke commissions them to look into one of his agents whom he suspects of going rogue. The story’s hokey plotting is reflected in its pulpy prose (“I don’t know why, but I feel as if, where this case is concerned, the fate of worlds is at stake!”). Readers will lose interest long before the climax arrives. Agent: Howard Morhaim, Howard Morhaim Literary. (Oct.)