The gone world by tom sweterlitsch

“She had been warned she would see things her mind wouldn’t understand.”


I picked up
The Gone World
by Tom Sweterlitsch while browsing new releases at the local library based on nothing more than the title and evocative cover. On my second read through of the jacket cover blurb I gave up on understanding the plot summation and decided to take a risk on the book. I got far enough to see it has something to do with murder and time travel, and if there is one genre that is catnip for me, it’s time travel thrillers. I’m happy to say this blind grab was absolutely worth it.
The Gone World
is dark, twisty, and inventive, with big ideas and a plot that grabs you from the prologue. More than just an empty thrill machine, the characters are the engine that drives the plot forward keeping the reader engaged as the story gets more and more haywire.

Since the 1970’s the US has been secretly conducting a number of Deep Space and Deep Time travel exploration under the arm of the Naval Space Command (NSC). The only “real” world is the present day, referred to as Terra Firma. In the novel Terra Firma is March 1997. Time travelers can only move forward from

The Gone World




Inception


meets


True Detective


in this science-fiction thriller of spellbinding tension and staggering scope that follows a special agent into a savage murder case with grave implications for the fate of mankind....



“I promise you have never read a story like this.” (Blake Crouch,


New York Times


best-selling author of


Dark Matter


)


Shannon Moss is part of a clandestine division within the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. In western Pennsylvania, 1997, she is assigned to solve the murder of a Navy SEAL's family - and to locate his vanished teenage daughter. Though she can't share the information with conventional law enforcement, Moss discovers that the missing SEAL was an astronaut aboard the spaceship USS Libra - a ship assumed lost to the currents of Deep Time. Moss knows firsthand the mental trauma of time travel and believes the SEAL's experience with the future has triggered this violence.

Determined to find the missing girl and driven by a troubling connection from her own past, Moss travels ahead in time to explore possible versions of the future, seeking evidence to crack the present-day case. To her horror, the future rev




Words

&

Dirt







It feels odd to call Tom Sweterlitsch’s 
The Gone World
a “fun” read, but fun is a whole lot of what I had while reading it. In this riveting and extremely grim science fiction thriller, the classic detective novel gets a time travel twist. Sweterlitsch’s imagination demonstrates impressive nuance and scope, and his prose slices the mind like a brutal blade.


The Gone World 
begins in 1997, and tells the story of Shannon Moss, an agent working for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). In most ways, Moss is a typical hard-boiled detective: highly intelligent, intimate with humanity’s dark side, and sporting a gruff persona that conceals a vulnerable and compassionate heart. The one notable exception is her left leg, which was amputated above the knee after an accident in the field. Moss’s relationship with her own physicality and ambulation through the use of various prosthetics are differentiating factors that make her more interesting and sympathetic than other protagonists in this genre.

Moss’s particular role within NCIS isn’t what you’d expect. In order to solve high-priority crimes fo



Title: 

The Gone World



Author:
Tom Sweterlitsch


Genre:
Science Fiction, Thriller


Publisher:
G.P. Putnam’s Sons

Publication Date:
February 2019

Paperback:
400 pages







“I promise you have never read a story like this.”—Blake Crouch, 
New York Times
bestselling author of
Dark Matter





Inception
 meets 
True Detective
 in this science fiction thriller of spellbinding tension and staggering scope that follows a special agent into a savage murder case with grave implications for the fate of mankind…


Shannon Moss is part of a clandestine division within the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. In western Pennsylvania, 1997, she is assigned to solve the murder of a Navy SEAL’s family—and to locate his vanished teenage daughter. Though she can’t share the information with conventional law enforcement, Moss discovers that the missing SEAL was an astronaut aboard the spaceship 
U.S.S. Libra
—a ship assumed lost to the currents of Deep Time. Moss knows first-hand the mental trauma of time-travel and believes the SEAL’s experience with the future has triggered this violence.

Determined to find the missing girl and driven by a