Stephen Lawhead has never been a conventional Christian author, or even a conventional fantasy author. He writes by his own rules. Sometimes I like what he does, sometimes not so much. But all in all I was pleased with his novel The Skin Map, and look forward to the continuation of the series. The main character is a generally unremarkable young man, Kit Livingston, who lives in contemporary London. One day, on the way to his girlfriend’s apartment, he gets lost and wanders into an alley, where he meets a man who claims to be his great-grandfather, Cosimo Livingston. Cosimo claims that there are invisible paths and portals (“ley lines”) throughout the world, by which knowledgeable travelers may travel through time, space, and dimension. Kit tries to explain to his girlfriend Wilhelmina why he missed their date. To prove his story to her, he takes her back to that alley and successfully makes a jump to the historical past—17th Century London. But he gets separated from Wilhelmina, who finds herself (we learn later) in Bohemia at about the same time. (One of the pleasures of this book is the Wilhelmina subplot, in which an unhappy 21st Century feminist finds personal

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