When Does Now Begin?

When Murray Fenwick, a bumbling Hartford antiques appraiser, accidentally activates a mysterious brass device hidden in his Aunt Gladys’s Victorian attic, he unwittingly triggers an emergency protocol that tears open the fabric of time itself, pulling Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Ulysses S. Grant, Amelia Earhart, Harry Houdini, and Cleopatra through a shimmering portal and depositing them, one by one, into the most chaotic Tuesday afternoon Hartford has ever seen. The cause of the crisis is Reginald P. Snoot, a gray cardiganed, accordion folder clutching clerk of the Department of Historical Permanence who, after eight hundred and forty seven thousand years of processing the paperwork of all human history without so much as a thank you, has finally snapped and activated a Temporal Eraser capable of deleting every era, every civilization, and every person who ever lived, intending to rebuild history from scratch with himself properly credited. Armed with Einstein’s physics, Earhart’s leadership, Grant’s unshakeable nerve, Twain’s devastating wit, Houdini’s preternatural talent for getting into places he shouldn’t, and Cleopatra’s absolute refusal to be impressed by anything, the unlikely team must navigate a bureaucratic labyrinth of infinite filing cabinets and fluorescent lit waiting rooms, only to discover that the key to stopping Snoot lies not in genius or heroism, but in the one skill that Murray, the most ordinary person in the room, has spent his entire career quietly mastering: knowing what something forgotten is truly worth.