The Past Trader – Donohoo (2023)

[msstice]

This is a financial thriller with a time travel core (A “What if I could go back in time and buy APPL?” class of story). It has a cool big idea, and builds a very character and event driven story around it. I was pretty engaged with the book until about the 90% mark. At that point I began to worry that the author, though setting up the story well, was not going to be able to bring it home, and my fears came true.

So, should you read this book?

On the plus side of the ledger, it starts with a cool idea, and has an engaging main character and the author is able to write little sketches well, and bring characters and places to life.

On the minus side, the main cool idea is never explained or elaborated, leaving me hanging in the science fiction department. I had hopes it would be explained at the end, but by the time I got to the 90% mark I realized the author was not going to make it.

The author also glosses over details of the financial matters and so left me hanging in the financial thriller department too. At the start there is a lot of invented jargon that sounds financial but actually isn’t and later on in the story any pretense of connecting with actual financial instruments and jargon is given up.

There is a sporadic parallel arc involving a mercenary/CIA type fighting in Ukraine. I hoped there would be a meaningful connection to the main story, but none materialized.

The ending seemed rushed, a bit Deus Ex Machina, and not well explained. I will admit that there is a short two page epilogue that may be meaningful if I had paid more attention to the minor side characters/events, but I just couldn’t be bothered to go back and comb through the book to see if this was indeed the case.

All in all, I’ve read worse books, and the author does write well, and I did enjoy part of the journey, but it got more and more unsatisfactory as we approached the end. The author is able to write isolated sketches that bring characters and places to life, but struggles to weave it all together and bring about a decent conclusion, which marred it for me.

Thank you NetGalley for an ARC of this book.

Personal notes (Quibbles, notes on style, structure etc. etc. some spoilers)​

Key concept (Chapter 3 spoilers)​

The heart of the book, introduced in chapter 3 is quite innovative (though complete nonsense). I’ll quote some key sentences:

1. “The fabric of the present is all that exists – everything else is just a frame-dragging effect that our brains have evolved to process”
2. “But money and capital have a sort of gravity to them within the chaos – a tiny, almost imperceptible weight – but there. The gravity of capital can change things both in the future and in the past.”

This starts us off promisingly (and we choose to ignore the misuse of the existing technical term frame-dragging.) and somewhere in the middle of the book the word “quantum physics” is mentioned, which kept me salivating, but sadly that was it, and I felt pretty let down that the whole how is the past changed and what does it look like is just completely ignored as the author rushes to try and end things.

This lack of explanation is further annoying because "capital changes time" is nonsense because "capital" is simply a loose name for some complex aspects of human behavior and has no significance for fundamental physical law. If you are going to propose one, you better explain it.

POV problems​

The book has a point of view quality control problem. There are two point of view characters Tallie and Jimmy.

Chapters 1 and 2 are in third person Tallie, Chapter 3 is in first, but it is easy to deduce that it is Tallie. Chapter 4 is third person but for a new character, but there is a gender change, so that is easy to deduce, and this is Jimmy. Chapter 5 is third person flashback Tallie, Chapter 6,7 third person Tallie, Chapter 8 third person Jimmy.

Up to this point I had found the switches between close third and first person for Tallie slightly jarring, a little risky and pointless, but not super annoying. Then, chapter 9 starts out as first person Tallie and then abruptly switches to third person Tallie in the middle of a thought. I realized then that this was writer error – they had started, at least this chapter, in one point of view and rewritten in another, but had been careless.

Even without this error, the switches were a little surprising, because they were between first person and close third person for the same character and don’t buy us that much. It made me begin to wonder if the author had decided (or had been told) to rewrite the book in a different voice and had made a hash of the revision.

Infodumps​

There are quite obvious infodumps throughout the book, but they are skillfully done. They interweave world building, or biographical information with the action and serve to set the stage for what just happened and what will happen, so they are engaging and not obtrusive. Some of the infodumps are disguised as banter between the MC and her convenient protege, though these are heavy on invented jargon. Some of them are straight up exposition.