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Three hundred years from now, Earth has been rendered uninhabitable due to the technological catastrophe known as the Nanocaust. Archaeologist Verity Auger specializes in the exploration of its surviving landscape. Now, her expertise is required for a far greater purpose. Something astonishing has been discovered at the far end of a wormhole: mid-20th-century Earth, preserved like a fly in amber.
Somewhere on this alternate planet is a device capable of destroying both worlds at either end of the wormhole. And Verity must find the device, and the man who plans to activate it, before it's too late - for the past and the future of two worlds.
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To cut to the chase the book centres around an alternate 1959 Paris discovered at the end of an ancient wormhole/portal. There's two main chracters, Floyd - a part-time private detective and part-time musician from the alternate Earth and Auger - an archeologist studying Paris on our own Earth (now covered in ice and suffering from the remnants of a nano-technological virus) a couple of hundred years in the future. Needless to say their two worlds collide as expeditions are sent through the portal to learn about the alternate world and to find out why an agent, sent through the portal earlier, has beem mysteriously murdered. It's gripping stuff with some very good action (not just of the fire-arm kind) and not without a fair dose of classic film-noir paranoia thrown in too.
The quality isn't 100% though, there some bits that near the end that seemed a bit silly, Reynolds seems to "over tell" things at a few points "Floyd stood up, walked to the door and opened it, then walked down the stairs" - that's not a quote but it's the general idea. These flaws are however few and far between. I genuinly felt some of the wonder that these characters from the future must have felt as they walked the streets 200 years in the past for the first time, and there's some vivid surreal imagery on offer.
As other reviews have noted, at the half-way point it's all change. We get into an extended hi-tech chase sequence and the plot development stalls. The editor should have been harsher here. More serious is the collapse of plot credibility. Why would the "extremist slashers" want to unleash their genocidal plan on E2? Both revenge and the quest for real-estate are equally implausible as motivations. And the ending is scrappy.
A shame really - this had potential for audience crossover, but SF folk will like it, even those who hang out at /.
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