Time Travelers Never Die by Jack McDevitt

Jack McDevitt has provided some pretty good space opera type science fiction books over the years, and I've enjoyed reading them. This one is a little more near-future, and rehashes a few of the old time travel ideas. A physicist named Michael Shelbourne disappears, and his lawyer gives his son, Shel, an envelope containing instructions for such circumstances. He is told to go to a storage locker and destroy the devices inside of it. If he did, it would have made the story much shorter.

They turn out to be time travel devices, and Shel begins to experiment with them, eventually going back in time a few weeks to talk with his father before his disappearance, and finding out that there are several big events in history that Michael wants to visit. So Shel and his friend Dave begin traveling through time and space, trying to determine why his father went missing.

There was no new ground covered in this book. No paradoxes are allowed, and though the pair have more adventures than Bill and Ted of movie fame, none of them are particularly interesting. McDevitt introduces a love triangle in the early going, but even that doesn't spice up the action very much. McDevitt is a good writer, but his time travel debut falls flat.