A disappointing novel from Rob Hart. His first foray into sci-fi and it lacked so much back story it was hard to discern who was who and why they are there. Time travel aside Hart gave us no indication why we were in the time and place we got ourselves to. The novel lacked depth and character development. Not really even understandable plot. Better luck on his next novel. .

"Time travel is weird."

This book felt like one of those novelty meals you get at touristy places, where you get some giant, oversized, delicious-but-way-too-much version of a burger or a pizza or something guilty pleasure-like. There's so much going on here, but in a fun way that I can't put my finger on. Like you've just walked into someplace with lots of really neat things going on, but you don't know which way to look first.

January is head of security at the Paradox Hotel, a waystop for rich people on their way to experience time travel excursions. The hotel is allegedly hemorrhaging money though, and a conference involving the richest four people in the world has been convened to potentially privatize the hotel's existence. A man turns up dead, January starts to investigate, and gets caught up in something incredibly complex, while also battling the complications from being a stage-2 Unstuck--someone who has experienced way too much time travel and is unraveling medically as a result. Things get wonky, as any storyline involving time travel does, but oddly philosophical as well as January works through the meaning of death and loss.

The author could probably have pared down all of these great ideas a bit and still had a great story at the end. It feels muddy, confusing in some places the way time travel books can be, and there's a large cast of characters that's periodically referred to by either their first or last names. Despite all that, I had a lot of fun reading this book, and I can't point to why. Some of the ideas feel like they could have been explored in their own separate books, and I felt like the entire layer of the conference wasn't necessary to tell the story (but did a great job of highlighting January's asshole protagonist nature), but I don't care. It was great fun to read.

"In a moment I’ll be gone. Probably reality too. The timestream is broken and I’m the only one who can fix it, but instead I’m dying on the floor. Sorry, universe"

Welcome to the beautiful one-of-a-kind Paradox Hotel; A place where, if you have the money, the world and every moment that's happened from the very beginning; The Paradox Hotel has turned the world into a playground for the wealthy, at least for now. One of four trillionaires is about to gain ownership of the hotel and with it the freedom to restrict access to the timeline as they please.

Enter January Cole. As the hotels head of security she isn't too happy with the idea of the hotel going private. The problem is with the time she's spent inside the timeline in order to do her job, she has become "unstuck" meaning not only is her job at jeopardy, her entire grasp of reality is also on the line.


What I loved about this book:
The premise, for starters; Hart has created a wonderfully complex and interesting world that sucks readers in from the very first page. With so many rules and the very nature of the idea of time travel itself, every chapter brings new twists, spins, and surprises..

- The characters are wonderfully diverse and I LOVE the nonbinary and LGBTQ representation. January herself is actually one of the best parts of this book. Sharp as a whip, mouthy, stubborn, and hilariously sarcastic I spent the whole book wondering what was going to go through her head, or come out of her mouth next.

There are so many other reasons to love this book, I feel like I could go on forever. There is however a slight issue I had at times with the pace of the book. There were events I felt there was too much focus on, slowing down the progression of the story in a way that was a bit frustrating at times; However, with the pieces of the puzzle revealed in-between these slower moments, I never once felt like abandoning this book.

I cannot recommend this book more. I would rate this a 4.5, easily a five if some of the minor events were less of a focus at times.

Thank you so much to netgalley and publishers for gifting me an advanced e-copy and the chance to share my honest opinion. I will be telling every booklover I know to read this for quite some time!

Don't get me wrong, I usually love an unreliable narrator. But this was maybe just a bit too much for me. January, the main character, is Unstuck in time so there were a lot of times where I was just confused as to when we were and the reader is just completely unable to tell or even guess what is real and what is not. It took a while for the story to really get going and January was a bit too cranky for me but the concept and time travel was interesting enough for me to finish.

I think this book was okay and I think other people would find it to be really good!

Thank you to the publisher and the author for the eARC!

January Cole is very good at her job, or at least she was. As the head of security at The Paradox Hotel, her days and nights are never the same. Rich guests stay here before traveling back in time. Yep. Want to see dinosaurs or meet Picasso, anything is possible if you can afford it and play by the rules. Before January started this job, she was a time detective, following guests back in time who wanted to change the past. Too much exposure has left her unstuck, a condition where glimpses of the past seem just as real to her as anything occurring in the present.
If her boss knew how far her illness has progressed, she would lose this job. But she can’t let that happen because it is her only connection with someone she loved and lost. A challenged January still makes decisions designed to protect everyone. But the government has decided to sell the hotel and its time travel technology to the highest bidder, and someone is determined to win.
Soon January and the hotel are thrown into chaos. Dinosaurs roaming the halls, time speeding up and slowly down randomly, and the growing sense that there is much more going on here than she can handle. There came a point where I was thoroughly confused, but I really liked January (she was terribly rude and snarky, but I have worked in security and I would have loved to say some of the things she said) and the plot was intense, so I pushed on. I am glad I did because most everything started to make sense. Some moments were hilarious, some were very sad, and some were full of nail-biting tension. All in all, it was a heck of a story and I must wonder how the author kept everything straight while writing The Paradox Hotel.

January Cole is in charge of security at the ritzy Paradox Hotel, from which rich guests can time-travel back in time to experience different eras. When a blizzard rolls in, people are stranded, there are high-value customers stuck and murders start happening. January has to try to figure this all out while her own mental health is slipping, dinosaurs are running around loose and someone on staff is actively working against her. A work of impressive science fiction from Hart.

January Cole has a unique edge in her role as house detective at the Paradox Hotel: excessive exposure to the time stream has left her temporally unhinged. Eventually this will render her catatonic, but in the meantime it allows her to interact with her girlfriend's ghost and perceive dangers slightly before they happen. Then her job shifts from keeping rich idiots from smuggling dinosaur eggs out of the Cretaceous to protecting the trillionaires who've come to bid on recreational time travel. She's so busy thwarting assassinations she barely has time to figure out why time is unraveling, let alone cope with her grief. Simultaneously convoluted and poignant.

Like a combination of Inception and Optional Retirement Plan.
A woman is a former federal agent, a time detective stopping T-Rex poachers and literally everyone trying to hack the lottery. As part of moving through time, she becomes "Unstuck" in time, a medical issue that makes her see glimpses of the past in real-time, hallucinations that start to break her sanity. Using an AI robot assistant as a totem (see Inception) she tries a job as a in-house detective at the hotel that serves the super-rich clients coming to use the time machine for vacation and adventure.
The main plot mover is when the hotel starts to go up for sale. Trillionaires start arriving to make a bid on the hotel and the technology that will accompany it. And then dinosaurs start showing up, everybody starts to murder everyone else, and the only person who thinks they can save the day can't stay in the present.
Overall, a great story. The main plot is very personal, a woman trying to find love and forgiveness. The plot scales up quickly to include "literally all of space-time" but the focus never leaves the characters. Why people make decisions, why they choose to forgive or not, how they move on from loss, all these questions get attention under Hart's writing. Even something as specific as how people disagree on privatizing government agencies.
The beginning is a slow-roll, letting the reader wonder why things are happening until the world-building explains everything. There is zero attempt to explain the physics of time travel, which I appreciate... mostly because it's in character for the protagonist. Her diagnosis of "Unstuck" has a little hand-waving (how would prescription drugs stop getting pulled through time, just block the brain's ability to see anything?) but it serves the plot well.
The LGBT+ aspects are well done, written to serve the story instead of politics. Thank you Hart, for not giving me another afterschool special on pronouns and letting the characters explain themselves. Almost like real humans do.
Highly recommended, even if the ending is hand-wavey and swerves from science fiction into science-go-I-hope-this-works.
**I received an advance copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Oooh, this book had me at the short pitch. A hotel for time travelers? A murder mystery? Shadowy organizations and corporate bigwigs? Yes please! The story is super intriguing with a lot of great twists and surprising elements (like chasing baby dinosaurs through a hotel of snooty elites!) I loved January's character. She's absolutely exhausted with everything and has zero patience for the politics and drama around her. She has some definite flawed character traits but I didn't really see her as unlikable. The flaws and "unlikable" actions made her seem more real. Overall a great read, really engaging, and an amazing premise!

I read The Paradox Hotel in one sitting. It is an interesting story set with a backdrop of time travel. January Cole is in charge of security at the Paradox Hotel located adjacent to the Einstein, where time travel takes place. Time travel has become a vacation destination for those with the money. Trips to ancient Egypt, the Battle of Gettysburg, or the Triassic Period among others are all available. Time travel is overseen by the Time Enforcement Agency and time travel is government-run. The story starts with us learning about January's condition. She is Unstuck. This means, because of the amount of time she has previously spent policing traveling in time, she will occasionally have short slips in her timeline. Past or Future, she will be in a different timeline while her body is zoned out in the present. But things have been getting worse as the condition progresses.

The story that follows becomes a locked door mystery set entirely in the hotel and I never knew exactly who to trust. With the Government wanting to sell the facility to the highest bidder to cover national debts, four high-profile bidders have arrived for a summit. The future of reality is at stake, and each of the bidders has a personal reason for wanting to gain unlimited access to the past. The overriding question is how much change can the past handle before the future falls apart? And if you know the future, should you and can you try to change it? Our moral compass throughout the book is January. She is a flawed and broken character who is often mean and vengeful. She has suffered a recent personal loss and that consistently impacts January's actions. In spite of January's rough edge, I really liked her as a character.

This story is very complex. January has to handle dinosaurs that were being smuggled, breakdowns in surveillance, time that is actually speeding up and slowing down at the hotel, and murder attempts that she can see in her time slips. There is so much more! I loved how January had to race against "time" and her own grasp on "time". I will happily recommend The Paradox Hotel.

Thank you Random House Publishing Group Ballantine and Netgalley for the arc.

I’ve always enjoyed stories that take something big or unusual, like an intergalactic war or – in the case of Rob Hart’s The Paradox Hotel – time travel, and then look past it or just to one side. What does it take to support an enterprise like time travel? Who gets to participate, and how? What second-order effects does it have on both the workers and the travelers? Perhaps most important, what kind of rules are required and who enforces them?

These questions form the backdrop against which Agent January Cole of the Time Enforcement Agency has to solve a murder threatening to derail the government’s sale of the time travel complex – essentially selling time travel itself – to a private bidder to generate much needed revenue.

This review is based on an advance copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley for that purpose. The book will be available on February 22, 2022.

Agent Cole’s posting at The Paradox is both a recognition of an outstanding career surfing the time stream and stopping travelers from doing things that will mess up the present, and the acknowledgement that such success came at great cost. Cole is Unstuck, a medical condition associated with time travel that means at random intervals she experiences events from the past or future. There are three stages of Unstuck which culminates in an irreversible coma-like state.

Cole is also dealing with, poorly, the loss of the love of her life, who she sometimes sees when Unstuck. As the protagonist, Cole is richly drawn, with conflicts internal and external driving her forward through a world seeming to unravel around her (did I tell you about the dinosaurs?). Surrounded by a diverse and fascinating cast of characters, if Cole can just figure out who the killer is, perhaps a part of her life will again make sense.

This is the second book I’ve read and enjoyed from this author; I’m definitely looking forward to more stories from him.

An incredible fast paced labyrinth of intrigue set in a time travel motel from the perspective of a truly screwed up fed agent January Cole. Jan is about as unlikeable as could be imaginable but also deathly ill & close to or past the 3rd stage of time stream poisoning. Using that word to keep from technicalities of exactly what the mind & body can take with too much information & altered reality. This book is excellent

*Full review to be posted closer to release in early 2022!*

I read and really enjoyed Rob Hart's The Warehouse back in 2019 and loved the story and themes he played with, so I was thrilled to have a chance to read The Paradox Hotel. The Paradox Hotel was an incredibly unique and interesting premise, and although it wasn't necessarily my favorite, there's no denying how interesting and fun this book was. Definitely one to check out for anyone into unique concepts, time travel, and sci-fi!

Wasn’t sure what to expect from this but I mostly enjoyed it. The first part is slow, then the pace picks up but the ending fizzles out again. A bit of a disappointment in the ending but still a decent read. Original idea and fairly good plot. Some things were a bit too overdone for me and I found the mystery part a tad too obvious.

Set in the dystopian future of year 2072, Rob Hart delivers a fun, exciting novel, complete with time travel and confusion that will keep readers guessing until the end.

January Cole is the head of security at the Paradox Hotel. This hotel is anything but ordinary. In this hotel, you can travel back in time to any period of history. The catch? You have to have the money in order to pay for your trip. I think “anything but ordinary” is great tagline for this novel because January Cole is the same. Cole is ‘Unstuck’ - a term used to describe those who are not locked into or stuck in one moment in time. Throughout these three stages of being ‘Unstuck’, one can start by feeling deja vu. They can go as far as feeling they’re in a completely different moment entirely, then when returning to the true present, they realize no time has passed since slipping into this Unstuck period. Is it a little confusing at first? Yes. Did I do a horrible job explaining it? Definitely.

The books was phenomenal. I’m also a sucker for a good first-person POV story, and this was as well written of one as I’ve seen. This book is a murder mystery, but it also is infused with greed, money, politics, and everything in between. As with most sci-fi books I’ve read, it takes a little time to wrap your head around the universe the author created, but once you do, you’re in for a ride. This was as good as any sci-fi novel I’ve read and is definitely one of the books that I read the quickest this year. I thoroughly enjoyed Hart’s last novel, The Warehouse, and this one did not disappoint. If you’ve never ventured into the world of sci-fi, this would also be a great start. It’s a fantastic page-turning joy ride that is anything but ordinary.

I really enjoyed Rob Hart’s The Warehouse so was pretty excited to read his newest release. The Paradox Hotel is about a hotel connected to the Einstein timeport where the rich and powerful stay before they take a flight to any time period in the past to observe any event in the past… But not change anything.

January Cole is Head of Security at the hotel. Unfortunately she’s Unstuck in time which means that she’ll find herself in the past or possibly in the future for several minutes at any time.

I enjoyed January’s character even though she’s snarky and not very nice to her co-workers. For whatever reason, her co-workers are unfailingly loyal to her no matter what she does or says. I really enjoyed her AI sidekick, Ruby, the most. (Picture a flying Roomba with googly eyes.)

January works to solve a “possible” future murder that she found as a result of being Unstuck. And let’s also throw in a few killer dinosaurs for kicks and giggles.

The premise was fun, but I did get lost quite a few times not quite knowing which time period we were in. Past, future, present? I wasn’t always sure.

Still, for the most part, I did enjoy the story, with its snarky heroine, political intrigues, and the time travel twists.

The ending was odd and I ended up deducting a star. I just didn’t get it, to be honest, and felt disappointed when I finished the book.

I do like Rob Hart enough to definitely be on board to read whatever he comes up with next.

*Thanks so much to Random House and NetGalley for the advance copy!*

Many of us have been time travelers, flying through several time zones and then adjusting our obstinate internal clocks. It's called jet lag and it can wreak havoc on our alertness and energy. Now, imagine that a couple of geniuses have invented a way to move not just a day in time, but millennia! Imagine the "jet" lag that might affect the frequent traveler in those conditions. That's what Rob Hart has done in his latest story, The Paradox Hotel.

January Cole is a security agent who has been dealing with such lag on a fairly continuous basis since the invention of the Einstein Intercentury Timeport. She has hunted down the events and people involved when they disrupt the standard timeline and she has worked to restore it. This has had an additive affect on January's psyche and she is becoming Unstuck, slipping at random into past events and maybe future ones as well, though traveling to the future is not possible, theoretically - Schrödinger's cat, quantum theory, etc. This deleterious effect is a known phenomenon, delineated into stages, and January is aware that she is nearing the third and final stage when her brain will totally short-circuit and she will fall into a coma, lasting until she dies.

January has opportunities to leave her current position as chief of security at the Paradox Hotel, the nearby stopping off point for travelers about to embark on a time trip, but she really does not want to leave the establishment, for the hotel is the only place where she slips back into encounters with her deceased lover, Mena. January's unstable life is livable as long as she can occasionally see Mena, even for a brief moment, but the hotel is being privatized and put up for sale. It is prepping to manage the bidding summit and is in a state of high commotion, continuing to host multitudes of finicky well-healed travelers and welcoming the onslaught of the richest people in the world and their entourages to place their bids, while there are increasing delays and cancellations of scheduled journeys at the nearby time portal. Oh, and the big clock hanging in the center of the hotel's lobby has become slightly erratic, the second hand skipping both backward and forward as the day progresses.

The structure of the story, as told through the interactions and thoughts of the protagonist, January, mirrors her perception and mental state - a relatively smooth arc of events and cognition at the start with an occasional short slip, slowly devolving into a kaleidoscope of images and events, rotating through configurations, new facets appearing, some disappearing, all being rearranged, the twist coming more and more often. January cannot just ride the wave and ease through the summit, for there is a potential (how true is something perceived in a slip?) murder to ward off, artifacts from the past illegally appear in the present, the bidders seem to be deceitful and have hidden agendas, and January's own irascible personality is affecting her ability to accurately interpret her own and other's interactions.

The Paradox Hotel would be an interesting and immersive mystery without the notion of time slippage added in, for it has all the standard details of a police procedural - murder, theft, powerful and deceitful suspects and an experienced but broken detective. When the story slips, between sentences, from a present circumstance to another, it is not immediately clear to the reader that this isn't the arrow of time moving forward to the next event. To the reader, it is the next event in the story, but to January, it might be that the next thing happening to her is a reliving of a past event. Confusion builds in the mystery as clues appear in different timelines and the real timelines of murders and thefts must be determined in order to identify the guilty individuals. This makes for an intriguing mystery, difficult for the reader and life-changing for January.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy of The Paradox Hotel.

The first rule of time travel is, “You do not f*** with the past.” The second rule of time travel is, “YOU. DO. NOT. F***. WITH. THE. PAST.”

Therein lies the problem with The Paradox Hotel. While time travel is a very cool idea, it seems rather boring from a tourism standpoint. You can visit, but you can’t really DO anything. What’s the point of going back in time if you can’t throw baby Hitler off the roof of the Heldenplatz? Or if violence against infants (even Hitler) isn’t your thing, go and grease some palms at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and make sure the little dictator has a creative outlet for all that rage. If you could do those things, then our protagonist, January Cole would not be employed at the Paradox Hotel. She seems to be in-charge of making sure nobody has any fun on their time travel vacation. Westworld this is not.

As I approached the halfway point of this novel, there began a niggling in my head, that aside from 3 chicken-sized velociraptors making an appearance, nothing of much interest had happened yet. Rather the reader is expected to keep track of numerous characters and plot lines; past, present, and potentially future. All from the POV of an unlikable, mentally unstable, hallucinatingly, unreliable narrator.

I’ve always had very little patience with protagonists who, because of their actions, attitudes or ineptitude cause constant grief for themselves and others around them. January Cole fits squarely into this profile.

While there was enough of a story there to continue; the time slippages, the hallucinations, the sense that there was no real way for the reader to determine what was “real” and what was “imagined” as a result of our narrator being Unstuck from reality, not to mention the potentially calamitous destruction of the entirety of human history and civilization, all brought about by the U.S. government trying to run a hotel, I continually found myself wishing it would end.

I’ll give this one 2 out of 5 stars. I was able to stick with it until the end and while the concept was neat, the story didn’t really grab me the way I’d hoped it would. I will keep Rob Hart on my radar and will certainly seek out more of his work in the future and from the past.

Two years ago I had the pleasure of spending 3 nights at JFK’s TWA Hotel. This is the only hotel attached to JFK airport, recently re-opened at the time of my stay, having been restored to all the grandeur of its mid-century heyday. Staying there is a bit like being a tourist who’s traveled back in time, a bit like staying at an interactive museum and certainly worth a visit for anyone who seeking material for their Instagram feed.

The Paradox Hotel is the only hotel attached to a timeport. Much like people today book flights to destinations around the world, people in the future book travel to destinations in the past. As the Paradox Hotel was described: its layout, its reputation with guests, its pros/cons, I was reminded strongly of the TWA Hotel and that specific hotel was my mental image as all the action in the book took place. About 20% into the book, the TWA Hotel was itself referenced (in the author credits, Hart specifically thanks them for their hospitality) so clearly the physical structure and the way it adjoins JFK was the blueprint for The Paradox Hotel and the adjoining timeport. That takes nothing away from the story; just an interesting insight.

The story is set in the 2070’s. Time travel is still new; the world economy is essentially in the hands of a few Ultra High Net Worth individuals, with some regulatory oversight that keeps government relevant. The timeport is government-run but commercial time-travel is open to the public. It is, of course, expensive and generally available only to the financial elite. “Regular people” can still experience time travel if they work in an industry that supports the endeavor – flight attendants for example. In the story time-travel and the timeport are owned, run and regulated by the U.S. government (see space exploration historically). Like space exploration, time exploration is expensive and the USA is going to be auctioning off the timeport to the highest bidder whilst continuing to regulate the industry. The Paradox Hotel is hosting the bidders – the world’s top Ultra High Net Worth individuals. This sets the stage for the story.

The protagonist, January, is the head of security at The Paradox Hotel as it contends with these competitive bidders and their entourages, along with the normal time traveling guests and the everyday operations of the hotel. However, there are some disruptions happening with time, suspending time travel until they are resolved, and January herself is suffering from the effects of too much time travel, causing hallucinations and shifts in her experienced timeline- altering her perceptions of reality.

I liked this book – it’s full of action and snappy dialogue. The concept of time travel is not new in science fiction and mostly handled well here, though the shifts and hallucinations could get a little confusing; the story might lend itself better to a screenplay than a novel. The writing is fluid-it’s good, escapism sci-fi. Overall I give it high marks for its genre. I also liked that there was a good representation of queer and gender non-conforming individuals. They were just there earning their paychecks, the story could just as easily been told from a hetero-normative perspective but the reality is that some people have a same-sex partner and other people don’t visually conform to a gender. None of those facts were central to the story – it’s never about a gay relationship or about being queer, the characters are just there, existing in the world where all the action is happening.

What I wasn’t comfortable with and ultimately what knocked this down from 5 stars is the heavy-handed progressive political views. This is a trend I’ve noticed in books the last couple years and it’s unsettling. In The Paradox Hotel, all UHNW individuals are evil, self-serving, competitive, with no interest in the common good. The wealthy hotel guests are all supercilious, self-absorbed, entitled, borderline abusive towards paycheck earners. January and all the hotel workers are depicted as long-suffering, forced to kowtow to the wealthy in order to make a living, but essentially “woke” and good people. The good vs. evil dynamic has certainly been around since the beginning of written literature but there was no nuance here, no exceptions, and an implicit judgment of today’s reader if they don’t hold the “correct” progressive political view.

This trend doesn’t bode well for literature to be a medium of common ground, of thoughtfulness, of charity to those not like oneself.

Thank you #NetGalley and Random House for this free ARC.

The Paradox Hotel by Rob Hart is an excellent adventure around the concept of time travel. It is the future, and time travel now happens through a hub, like an airport where people gather, get in costume and following instruction travel to the time period they chose. We get a look at the administration around the organization, particularly security through the protagonist, January. She has traveled too many times and is involved in "time slips" where she sometimes experiences disorientating moments, where figures from her past, or previous adventures briefly appear.

Around this setting, there is murder, which happens under the difficult conditions surrounding the fact that the time travel operation was going to be bid upon. With all the potential bidders and their entourages gathering, the tension surrounding the mystery heightens.

I loved this book; the concept, the characters, and the plot. This was one of those works that I read carefully as I did not want it to end, and chose to savor my reading experience. If you like science fiction, mystery, and great characters ,you will enjoy your time at The Paradox Hotel.