Sadly, as I said, it really is at the expense of an actual story. The book has a small cast, which gives each character a great deal of room to develop. The question of whether to finally tell him the truth, and bring him in on the years-long conspiracy against his family, is a fine piece of drama, although it's solution is fairly matter-of-fact.Ĭarol Davis and Esther D Reese can write all right. Tom has, quite reasonably, believed Sam to be dead. His resurrected brother Tom, unaware of Sam's time-travelling, has been living an alternate life that Sam has no memory of. But this book's strengths lie with Sam's family. Joe Powell could have been a great villain - he certainly has both the intelligence and the power. I'm always disappointed to pick up a book with a great premise, only to find myself repeatedly counting the ever dwindling number of pages left in which the story has to really start. I'd tell you how, gush about it's ramifications and enthuse about all the crazy logical possibilities that arise from this, but, and here's the thing, said villain, while he knows everything, does pretty well nothing. In this book, quite brilliantly, it does. No, the recurring disppointment of the books is that they have these wonderful ideas, which they never really get moving.įrom the very first TV series, I was waiting for Sam to encounter an enemy who knew all about him, but this really never happened.

These are precisely the sort of story-ideas that we should have got on television. I'm not knocking the novel range for repeatedly featuring these elements, quite the reverse. (I'm a slow reader)Īlthough this book is billed as 'The Conclusion', it is in fact set immeadiately prior to the events of Mirror Image - the final episode (at time of writing) of the TV series.Īs with so many Quantum Leap books, the story puts its own unique spin on the set-up of the weekly TV series, concentrates far more on events in the present day, and features a plot that uses time to threaten the project's very creation. I got this book for Christmas, and finished reading it today.

Quantum Leap by Carol Davis