This takes the old "I was adopted, but my real parents were royalty, and someday my family will come back for me" fantasy and pitches it on its ear.
Miriam Beckstein has a hell of a day. She gets fired, gets a box of her biological mother's effects (biomom was an unknown woman murdered in the park when she was six weeks old), stares at an odd locket her mother had...and the next thing you know, she's in another world. Which looks like ours, but seems to be more backwards in time.
Within a few days, they find and kidnap her.
Who are they, you ask? Her biological family, that's who- a large clan of people with a recessive gene that allows them to "world-walk". The alternate Earth they're from is much more undeveloped (sixteenth century?), so they make buttloads of money bringing goods back and forth between the worlds. Think the Medicis, but with access to technology and guns. They bounce back and forth between the archaic and living under royalty to running drugs across worlds. Bizarre, eh? And Miriam turns out to be the long-lost Countess Helge.
Unfortunately, there's a downside to being a countess and suddenly massively rich. Namely, that a good chunk of your relatives want to kill you, women are of lower status, and she's told she'd better marry a family member (only those who breed with relatives pass on the world-walking gene) that her uncle will approve of, or royalty (preferably retarded royalty), ASAP. Unfortunately for Miriam, the one guy she'd marry is engaged against his will to a girl who'd also rather not marry him.
But soon enough, Miriam's ducking a bunch of assassins, and figuring out that at least one faction trying to kill her is one nobody else knows about...
The book ends on a cliffhanger, which is annoying, but one suspects the original book got divided into two for sale purposes. At any rate, I'll be running off to get the sequel ASAP. Four stars- it's fascinating.
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