The Portal (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798896758402)

Virginia Tech. A theater in Aurora, Colorado. A church in Charleston, South Carolina. An open-air concert in Las Vegas. Columbine High School. Just a few entries in a sad list of mass shootings that have plagued our country for more than thirty years. Retired FBI agent JT Kirk has had firsthand experience with one of the worst of these horrors--the murder of nineteen first-graders and six educators at a Connecticut elementary school. An experience that burned a hole in his soul and led to his early retirement.

Enter Mr. Hall, an enigmatic representative of an advanced group of beings, perhaps extraterrestrial, perhaps something else. They have selected retired agent Kirk to receive a gift--a means of traveling back in time--but with an important restriction. Time travel backward is impossible-- recall the grandfather paradox. He would be traveling back in time not to his own universe, but to a nearly identical alternate universe, eliminating any paradox issues. A universe with the same people and history as his own. And with the same tragedies.

Kirk quickly forms a team--among them, former Newtown detective Sean Donnelly, once the lead detective for the elementary school shooting, now also traumatized into retirement. And Karen Savard, a resident of the alternate universe, saved from her fate as an airline crash victim. Together, these and others work within the alternate universe to prevent the litany of horrors that had already occurred in Kirk's home universe.

Easier said than done, however. In the words of Mr. Hall, the timeline is sturdy. The result is a treacherous journey through almost twenty years of mass murders and mass casualties in the alternate universe. Many lives are saved, though some are lost. With help from some unexpected sources, Kirk and Donnelly struggle to achieve a kind of redemption, but it comes with a cost. This is a story of justice, and vengeance, and the gray area in between. All leading to a thrilling climax, one last battle with evil, involving both universes.