St. John, Eva. The Quantum Curators and the Enemy Within. Quantum Curators No. 2. Mudlark’s Press, 2020.
The early twentieth-century adventure story vibe one gets from the title of The Quantum Curators and the Enemy Within is a clue to the tone of this series. Julius, a nerdy archivist from Cambridge University, has been dragged into the alternate Earth that was revealed in the first volume and now works with the alternate Earth team of time-traveling, universe-hopping relic hunters, whom he helped rescue a Fabergé egg in the first volume. The title gives away the plot element, that, oh my, there are some villains on his new team. In the first volume, Neith, a resident of alternate Egypt looks at the Thames in our world and opines that a river just doesn’t look right without crocodiles. In this one, Julius must come to grips with a futuristic Egypt that is the biggest superpower on alternate Earth. I enjoyed his fish-out-of-water story enough to put up with the hokey plot. 3.5 stars. ( )

I really am enjoying this series. A lot of people said it was just a copy of what Jodi Taylor was doing with her St. Mary's series (which I love btw), but this book really proved that wrong. The two series are quite different. This one focuses much more on an internal mystery on the alternative earth known as the Alpha Earth (as opposed to the earth we know, which they refer to as Beta). Despite believing themselves to be above the unevolved primitive flaws of our earth, such as greed, jealousy, corruption, and so on, it appears that Alpha version of Earth is more like us than they thought.

In the first book, a mystery began... one that left some of the main characters wondering who sabotaged the mission they had been sent on... to rescue a rare Faberge egg from destruction and bring it back to Alpha for display and preservation. When things started going wrong, the quantum curator team began looking at each other, trying to figure out if one of them had done what seemed almost inconceivable... become a traitor! The first book ended dramatically, with Julius Strathclyde. a Beta earth academic pulled through into Alpha world by Neith, one of the top quantum curators.

This book carries on with that storyline and opens with Julius working his way through courses and classes and simulations to attempt to become a quantum curator himself. He has some advantages, as he and Neith ended up trading certain parts of themselves when they came through the "stepper" that allows them to travel between the two parallel earths. But in other ways he struggles with a world so different than his own. And due to the fact that he is from Beta, he's able to recognize and identify corruption happening much more easily than the others, who can't seem to believe that anyone on Alpha would be so crass as to actually sell off rare Beta artifacts to private collectors to enrich themselves. Greed and selfishness are just not concepts they feel open to accepting, but it's clear that something is happening and together they need to figure out what. Meanwhile, they have no idea who can or cannot be trusted, which makes the book quite fun to read, as you are trying to figure out who the bad guys are and what is going on.

As the team members come to accept the idea that there are some corrupt people in power, it opens a can of worms that makes them question all kinds of things they hadn't considered before... lost teams that they had assumed were the result of accidents are suddenly since in a more sinister light, especially when Neith and Julius find themselves almost becoming such a statistic themselves.

I'm really looking forward to the third book, especially in light of a few things revealed at the end of this book! ( )