I recently received a copy of Stephen R. Lawhead’s new novel, The Skin Map, from the nice folks at Thomas Nelson.

Stephen R. Lawhead and I go back a long, long way (though I doubt he knows that). As a kid, I enjoyed his Dragon King Trilogy, and then as a teen I was pulled into the Pendragon Cycle. In recent years, my husband and I have both enjoyed his take on the Robin Hood story, through the books of Hood, Scarlet, and Tuck. So it didn’t take much deliberation before I happily agreed to read and review his latest novel.

Here’s how the publisher describes The Skin Map:

It is the ultimate quest for the ultimate treasure. Chasing a map tattooed on human skin. Across an omniverse of intersecting realities. To unravel the future of the future.

Kit Livingston’s great-grandfather appears to him in a deserted alley during a tumultuous storm. He reveals an unbelievable story: that the ley lines throughout Britain are not merely the stuff of legend or the weekend hobby of deluded cranks, but pathways to other worlds. To those who know how to use them, they grant the ability to travel the multi-layered universe of which we ordinarily inhabit only a tiny part.

One explorer knew more than most. Braving every danger, he toured both time and space on voyages of heroic discovery. Ever on his guard, and fearful of becoming lost in the cosmos, he developed an intricate code — a roadmap of symbols — that he tattooed onto his own body. This Skin Map has since been lost in time. Now the race is on to recover all the pieces and discover its secrets.

But the Skin Map itself is not the ultimate goal. It is merely the beginning of a vast and marvelous quest for a prize beyond imagining.

So what did I think?

In short: I liked it. To be honest, it took me a little while to get into the book. I think that for the first couple chapters, I didn’t particularly like any of the main characters. They seemed overly irritable, self-absorbed and, well, annoying. But before long, as they were pulled into an adventure that stretches the imagination, I came to like them and even to cheer them on. The second half of the book completely absorbed me and I had a hard time putting the book down in order to attend to things like, say, cooking dinner.

Kit, the book’s primary antagonist, finds himself following his grandfather along mystical pathways called ley lines, into other times and other places. They seek to recover and protect a “skin map” — essentially, a map of these mysterious routes and inter-dimensional roads that was once tattooed on an explorer’s body. (Yes, I know that sounds a bit gross, but it’s not that bad.)

At the same time, Kit’s girlfriend, Wilhelmina, gets taken along for the ride (quite against her will), but is separated from Kit and ends up in 17th Century Austria, where her entrepreneurial instincts and flair for business help her land on her feet.

As with any good adventure, there are bad guys pursuing the good guys, multiple plot lines that begin to merge as the book goes on, and enough twists and turns to keep readers intrigued and turning pages. The Skin Map does have a healthy dose of science fiction (I’m guessing the inter-dimensional travel already clued you in to that fact), but is full of both suspense and adventure.  It’s the first book in the Bright Empires series, so now I’m stuck waiting until the second book comes out, before I can see what happens to Kit and Wilhelmina.

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