Time Spike, by Eric Flint and Marilyn Kosmatka, is the latest outing in what the cover refers to as the “Ring of Fire” series, and which Flint has elsewhere referred to as the “Assisti Shards” series (IIRC). I picked it up because I generally like Eric Flint’s work; and since collaboration is a normal mode of operation for Flint, the fact that this one is a collaboration didn’t faze me.

And then I started trying to read it. Oh, my.

First, a bit of background. The book begins present day, in a United States in which the town of Grantville had mysteriously disappeared a few years before. A few dedicated researchers have been trying to discover how, and as the book beings they are detecting something interesting, and of greater magnitude (they think) than the Grantville event. (For those who came in late—the book 1632 has the entire town of Grantville being transported to Germany in 1632.) At the epicenter of the new event is a grossly understaffed maximum security prison—that gets transported to the age of the dinosaurs. They aren’t the only ones, either. Joining them are a bunch of Cherokees, some Spanish conquistadors, and some prehistoric men, and maybe a few others. Meanwhile, the scientists are running around present day, trying to figure out what happened.

It’s no sillier a premise than that of 1632, and it looked like it might be fun. But frankly, it’s awful. As I said to Jane, “Verily it sucketh.” The premise might be OK, but the writing and characterization are just plain clumsy. I sometimes couldn’t keep track of who was who from one page to the next.

I gave up after forty or fifty pages, something I almost never do; and then I handed it to Jane, just so that she could see how bad it was. She worked her way through it one day; her assessment: it was barely adequate, for a day when she’d been up with a sick kid half the night, and when moreover she’d neglected to take her thyroid medication and consequently was feeling particularly dopey. The bar was very low, is what I’m saying. And even then she skimmed it, skipping pages freely.

I don’t like panning books, in general. But Flint’s a popular author, and his readers should be warned, and he himself should be more careful what gets published under his name.