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In High Places (A Crosstime Traffic novel) by Harry Turtledove
01/10/2006 . Source: Paul Hanley 
pub: TOR/Forge. 270 page hardback. Price: $22.95 (US), $30.95 (CAN). ISBN: 0-765-30696-4. Buy In High Places in the USA - or Buy In High Places in the UK  check out website: www.tor.com
This book is apparently intended for the juvenile SF readership. I am 57 and I enjoyed it. It is by Harry Turtledove, a most prolific author, and I have reviewed many of his books before. However, although this books forms one in a series of four this is the first of them I have come across any of them. They deal with a late 21st century world much like one might imagine ours to be which has discovered a way of accessing parallels worlds. Such as the one the teenage heroine Annette is in with her parents where the Black Death endlessly ravaged medieval Europe even more badly than killing a quarter of the population. As a consequence it is a world where southern Europe is dominated by Arab/Moslem culture. The renaissance never occurred, so medieval style warlords hold northern Europe albeit armed with primitive gunpowder weaponry and believing in a form of Christianity.
Our heroine and her family are from our world and are posing as Arab traders in Paris, here the capital of the pocket-sized Kingdom of Versailles which is always under pressure from its powerful Arab neighbours who are as near as southern France. They, and those like them, come to these worlds to trade for things that are becoming scarce in their world.
Because the writ of law does not run very far, the merchants travel about in large escorted convoys. One of the lords of Versailles is suspicious of these Arab traders and sends a young soldier, Jacques, as part of the escort to spy on them.
The convoy is attacked, the escort overrun and the two youngsters form part of the loot taken away by the bandits who sell them as slaves.
Annette hopes to be rescued by her own people but, to her horror, she and the other slaves are taken to a crosstime portal and shipped to yet another world. In this one, people from her own world keep slaves and are steadily building up a little empire of their own. This has to be highly illegal. Use of the crosstime portals is supposedly strictly controlled and slavery has been abolished for centuries.
This then becomes a story of how Annette, with the help of Jacques, outmanoeuvres her captors despite all their modern weapons and technology, saves herself and her fellow slaves and brings the baddies to justice.
Unlike most of Harry Turtledove's books which generally use numerous viewpoint characters, in this book he restricts himself to Annette and Jacques which I believe helps make them better rounded characters and also makes for a more coherent story.
A little bit too black and white on the morality for my taste but then I am a lawyer so what would I know about that! Overall, it is an exciting adventure story and well worth reading.
Paul Hanley
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