Time and Robbery — Rebecca Ore

Time and Robbery features the protagonist of Rebecca Ore's Centuries Ago and Very Fast, Vel, a gay immortal born in Paleolithic who jumps time at will. Unless Vel can help out his younger self, Vel's tribe's descendants--a big chunk of the 21st-century British population--will be eliminated from the timeline. Present-day Vel, though, has problems of his own, so he takes a chance and outs himself (and his talented teen-aged daughter Quince) to Joe Tavistock, a subcontractor on the weak end of the plausible deniability chain dangling off British intelligence, making it Joe's problem. Joe's superiors are dubious, and Joe doesn't know who to trust. The stakes are high not just for Vel, but for everyone involved.
Terry Bisson, author of Fire on the Mountain and TVA Baby, writes of Time and Robbery, ''Rebecca is up to her old tricks here: surprising, puzzling, and delighting us at every turn; and in this sleek, lean detective tale, coolly twisting the tail of Time itself. Ore is that rarest of creatures, a writers' writer that readers also love.''
Rebecca Ore's first book about Vel, Centuries Ago and Very Fast, was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick and the Lambda Awards. As Jeff VanderMeer wrote for Locus Online: ''Centuries Ago and Very Fast by Rebecca Ore (from the truly amazing Aqueduct Press) has a kinetic energy and hard-to-define originality that held me captivated from first word to last. Profane--scandalous?-- the book wraps stories around stories, combines the surreal with the mundane and every-day.''