Allen Appel takes his readers on fictional flights to Russia during the 1917 Revolution, to the Reconstruction Era America of Mark Twain, and to Japan during the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima. His time-traveling protagonist, Alex Balfour, at the center of his "Pastmaster" series, has won readers of all ages since publication of the first novel, Time after Time. Often classified as a science fiction writer, Appel is first of all a fiction writer. His professional historian-hero Balfour does not climb into an ornate time machine for his travels, nor does he take lessons in breaking the membrane of temporality. Instead, Alex Balfour steeps himself in a time period, falls asleep, and quite unwillingly wakes up in another world:

"The headache was gone. Alex Balfour was lying face down in a shallow trench. The ground was cold and hard and smelled of clay and mold. He had just enough time to...