I may not have followed all of the echoes in time, creatures convincingly impersonating other creatures, or protagonists' complex, evolving motivations, but I adored the characters, their connection, their banter, and the amount of heart in the story.
Kembral Thorne, expert investigator, is on leave and bleary-eyed from single-parenting her newborn, and she's questioning why she agreed to come to a work New Year's Eve party in the first place.
But when people start dropping dead around her, she realizes that someone is plunging the party down through layers of reality, through echoes of time in which strange events loosely repeat themselves--and seem to be building in intensity. In fact, the whole world seems to be in terrible danger.
It looks like Kembral will have to work tonight after all--and, even worse, she'll need to cooperate with her nemesis Rika Nonesuch, the cat burglar, in order to try to save the world.
The last time Kembral and Rika came into contact, Kembral thought they might be building something real from their mutual attraction. Then Rika set up Kembral, leaving her literally in a pile of trash, humiliated and alone.
Now Rika and Kembral tentatively take steps toward a truce, and they're two of the only people retaining their memories through various realities, desperately trying to figure out how to stop the sinister game causing deaths (both reversible and permanent), how to outwit the increasingly strange and destructive creatures they encounter, and how to survive until midnight and keep everyone around them alive as well.
I didn't follow all of the echo world-building, in which things are similar to yet different from earlier versions, creatures lose their memories over and over, and people impersonate other people to convincing degrees. I was repeatedly left wondering who was who, much less what their motivations, pasts, and realities might be.
But I love Caruso's writing style, her character-building, and the way the characters relate to each other. The hard-fought connection between Rika and Kembral (and the rich past that's revealed) had me swooning, and their banter is sometimes grumpy, hesitantly vulnerable, and often darkly funny. I predict that I'll be reading all of Caruso's other books as well.
I listened to The Last Hour Between Worlds as an audiobook.
More about Melissa Caruso books--and more favorite Bossy reads that play with time:
This is the first of two books in Melissa Caruso's Echo Archives duology. The second book is The Last Soul Among Wolves. Caruso is also the author of the Rooks and Ruin and Swords and Fire series.
For Bossy reviews of many other books that play with time--this is one of my favorite elements--you can check out the books and lists at this link.
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