Oh, this is such a lovely book.

Based on the title, we know it is a book dealing with time travel (else why have a time war?). There's the briefest of adjustments in the beginning with the world building, and then we see that while the book is science fiction with two sides having agents who skip through time lines adjusting a world here, changing an action there, in order to shape the future into each side's desired outcome, and then we arrive at the heart of the tale, which is a love story.

The ending of the book is so beautiful that one wants to (and should) immediately flip back to the beginning of the book and read it again, pick up the details missed in the first reading, understand where the threads twist and cross. The different elements of history woven into the story make the story that much more beautiful.

Thoroughly enjoyed the book. Strongly recommended.

But wars are dense with causes and effects, calculations and strange attractors, and all the more so are wars in time. One spared life might be worth more to the other side than all the blood that stained Red’s hands today. A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet. Or her child does, or a smuggler she trades jackets with in some distant spaceport. And all this blood for nothing.
Page 2

Killing gets easier with practice, in mechanics and technique. Having killed never does, for Red. Her fellow agents do not feel the same, or they hide it better.
Page 3

"If train A leaves Toronto at six p.m. travelling east at one hundred kilometres per hour, and train B leaves Ottawa at seven p.m. travelling west at one hundred twenty kilometres per hour, when will they cross?”
Page 25

Nearly always amused when an Ottawa reference pops up in a book.

They drag the logs to camp. They split them, trim them, plane them, frame them into engines of war. Two weeks later, the planks lie shattered around the fallen walls of a city still burning, still weeping. Progress gallops on, and blood remains behind.
Page 34

Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small ; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.
Page 39

Eating’s gross, isn’t it? In the abstract, I mean. When you’re used to hyperspace recharging stations, to sunlight and cosmic rays, when most of the beauty you’ve known lies in a great machine’s heart, it’s hard to see the appeal of using bones that poke from spit - coated gums to mash things that grew in dirt into a paste that will fit down the wet tube connecting your mouth to the sack of acid under your heart.
Page 44

But I enjoy eating these days. More of us do than care to admit it publicly. I revel in it, as one only revels in pursuits one does not need. The runner enjoys running when she need not flee a lion. Sex improves when decoupled — sorry — from animalist procreative desperation (or even from the desperation of not having had sex in a while, as I’ve had cause to note after my recent two decades ’ sojourn and attendant dry spell).
Page 44

Humans need marks to strive for — but imperfect systems decay. So we build them ideals. Change agents climb upthread, find helpful strands, preserve what matters, and let what doesn’t fall to dust : mulch for the more perfect future’s seed.
Page 60

Fortunately, geniuses understand that young men are often fools.
Page 67

So the great-grand-emperor’s word goes out, and so a port is built, and sailors flock, beckoned by adventure. (Adventure works in any strand — it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.)
Page 67

She stained the page with herself. She sometimes forgets what she wrote, save that it was true, and the writing hurt. But butterfly wings break when touched. Red knows her own weaknesses as well as anyone. She presses too hard, breaks what she would embrace, tears what she would touch to her teeth.
Page 86

I wish I could have shown you where I’m from, hand in hand, the world I set out to build and to protect — I don’t think you would have liked it, but I want to see it reflected in your eyes. I wish I could have seen your braid, and I wish we could have left all those horror shows behind and found one together, for ourselves.

That’s all I want now. A small place, a dog, green grass. To touch your hand. To run my fingers through your hair.
Page 164

The tears have anger in them at first, but anger burns out fast. Tears stay.
Page 169

She has lost all the subtlety Blue ever teased her for lacking, her old competitive patience for a good officer’s work. She abandons her tools, retreats to the grossest physical foundations. Winning this battle, losing that, strangling that old evil man in a bathtub in his skyscraper penthouse, feels empty because it is : In the war they wage through time, what lasting advantage comes from murdering ghosts, who, with a slight shift of threads, will return to life or live different lives that never bring them to the executioner’s blade? Repetitive task, murder. Kill them and kill them again, like weeds, all the little monsters.

No death sticks but the one that matters.
Page 175

She cannot stop herself from reaching out, from trying with a touch to say, I’m here. Sometimes you have to hold a person, though they’ll mistake embrace for strangulation.
Page 182

Red may be mad, but to die for madness is to die for something.
Page 183

Again, for the 100th+ time, I need to write down why a book is on my to-read pile. Where was this one recommended? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'd guess Book Riot or micro.blog.

Anyway, the basic premise is that there is a chain of kidnapped children. Once a child has been kidnapped, she / he will be returned only if a ransom is paid and the ransomee kidnaps another child and repeats the instructions, inflicts the same mental anguish, on the next family. While the kidnapped person is nearly always a child, according to the rules, the loved one to be kidnapped could be an adult. In reality you can count on a mother's love for her child FAR MORE than a partner's love for their partner, so children are "better" targets to keep the chain going.

The psychological thriller part of the idea is the progression of victim to perpetrator, that to save one's child, one must inflict the same pain on another family. The book does an okay job of conveying the mental torture of how awful this would be, to have a belief about yourself, that you are a good person who would never do these things, and yet, here you are, doing these exact horrible things. There is absolutely no good way through what would be an absolutely horrible situation, if this were real. The mental scars would be around for a long, long time, which the second half of the book tries to portray, also doing an okay job.

That none of it leaked, despite going on for six years in a relatively small area (New England) strains the reader's suspension disbelief, unless said reader realizes that, eh, there is a lot of random shit that happens to good people, and no reason that people on the other side of the world / country / state would necessarily know about it. 50+ kidnapped kids a year, ehhhhhh, could happen.

If you're a fan of McKinty's writing, definitely read the book. If you like quick-paced, fast read, somewhat unbelievable psychological thrillers, this could also be a good read. It was waaaaaay better than The Woman in Cabin 10, if you want to use that as a reference point.

The Egyptians thought the afterlife was located in the stars. But there is no afterlife, is there? Grandma believes in the afterlife but nobody else does. It doesn’t make any sense, does it? If they kill you, you’re just dead and that’s that. And maybe a hundred years from now, they find your body in the woods and nobody even remembers who you were or that you’d gone missing.
Page: 25

“Rachel O’Neill, as I live and breathe,” he says with a grin. “Oh, Rachel, why do birds suddenly appear every time that you’re near?”

Because they’re actually carrion crows and I’m one of the goddamn undead, she thinks but doesn’t say.
Page: 33

There are a breathtaking number of people whose profiles and posts are public and can be viewed by anyone. George Orwell was wrong, she thinks. In the future, it won’t be the state that keeps tabs on everyone by extensive use of surveillance; it will be the people. They’ll do the state’s work for it by constantly uploading their locations, interests, food preferences, restaurant choices, political ideas, and hobbies to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites. We are our own secret police.
Page: 41

“Helen seems the type to brag about using that system to find her kids, but she hasn’t mentioned it,” Rachel says, surprising herself with the bitterness of this observation. She remembers that Tacitus line about how you always hate those you have wronged. Or those you are about to wrong in this case.
Page: 99

Rachel puts her hand on his chest and feels his heart beating. Calm, slow, deliberate. He has three tattoos: an ouroboros serpent, the Marine Corps logo, and the Roman numeral V. “What’s the V stand for?” she asks. “Five combat tours.” “The ouroboros?” “To remind myself that there ain’t nothing new under the sun. People have survived worse.”
Page: 208

"Recall that one builds a labyrinth not to hide but to lie in wait.”
Page: 242

Every choice she has is a bad one. Action is bad. Inaction is bad. It is a classic zugzwang situation. You have parachuted into the minefield and there is no safe way out.
Page: 245

“Either of you ever done any kriging or matrix programming or regression analysis?” he asks. “Kriging?” Rachel asks, wondering what the hell he’s talking about. “It’s a Gaussian-process regression. A tool for statistical analysis. No?” Pete and Rachel shake their heads. He taps the table number. “The number seventy-three means what to you?” “John Hannah, offensive lineman for the Pats,” Pete says quickly. “Gary Sanchez briefly wore number seventy-three when he first came up with the Yanks,” Rachel says. The man shakes his head. “What does it mean to you?” Rachel asks. “It is the twenty-first prime number. The number twenty-one has prime factors seven and three. A pleasing coincidence. Table seventy-seven is also free over there. It’s not prime, of course, but it is the sum of the first eight prime numbers and the atomic number of iridium. Iridium is how they finally proved what killed the dinosaurs, which was the big mystery when I was a kid. The iridium-marker layer in the K-T boundary. Atomic number seventy-seven was the harbinger of death for the dinosaurs. It’s an ending number. All books should end on the seventy-seventh chapter. They never do, though. But we’re beginning something here, aren’t we? Hence table seventy-three, which is a little more appropriate than seventy-seven, yes?” Rachel and Pete look at him in utter bafflement. He sighs. “All right. Mathematics is not your forte, I see.
Page: 247

She turns on Erik’s app. It has downloaded successfully but when she tries to open it, a message flashes on the phone’s home screen: For this app to work you need to enter the next number in this sequence: 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 20…If you enter the wrong number your phone will be locked and all devices associated with your account will be disabled for twenty-four hours.

She picks up the phone and types in 23.
Page: 290

“I always thought that if we were going to go down, it would be because of you tangling emotions with business.” She smiles. “Christ, Olly, that’s how everybody goes down in the end. Didn’t you know that? You can’t fight biology.” “You can try,” he says.
Page: 315