Stephen King wrote a butterfly effect book. In a doomed diner in Maine, there is a rabbit hole that takes you back to 1958. Every time you go down it, you are in the same place at the same time, and everything you did before is erased. Jake Epping is a burnt out teacher with an alcoholic ex-wife. When he is told about the time travel option, and encouraged to go back and save Kennedy from assassination, maybe change the world for the better, he agrees. It is intriguing. If Kennedy had lived, would we have ramped up involvement in Vietnam? Would the civil rights movement have gotten so out of hand? Would Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy have been assassinated? The book is not so much about who killed Kennedy but what would have happened if he had survived.
On the other hand, it is not at all about that. The bulk of this very bulky book is about a man out of his time fully engaging in the lives of those who belong there. He manages to fully engage in the life of a small Texas town, fall in love, be good at his job, and have people care about him. If he didn't have the whole Lee Harvey Oswald problem hanging over his head, he could be happy there.
But it not to be. First off, it is not easy to pretend that you don't know stuff. He gets caught in small but repeated errors that make people suspicious. And then there is the job at hand. Jake is not a killer, and so it is not all about just finding the guy and killing him. There is a process he has to go through to establish Oswald's probable guilt.
The story takes several turns before getting to an end--it is well written, and surprisingly quick to read--don't be daunted by it's size (this would be a great book to get on Kindle--much lighter that way).
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