The novel begins as a crime story: a murder, missing girl, and the agent investigating it. Except Shannon Moss does not work for regular department, but Naval Criminal Investigative Service - a small division that explores Deep Space and Deep Time. Her journeys into IFT — Inadmissible Future Trajectories, might be used as evidence, but never admitted as truth. Each jump is an attempt to understand the present by trespassing into something that cannot be kept.
Unlike many stories that play with the multiverse, The Gone World refuses the fantasy of improvement. There is no better branch waiting to be chosen, no redemption hidden in another timeline. The act of jumping - is what is evenutally posioning the present.
The novel is sometimes difficult to read, switching between the flat tone of investigation and the almost brutal nature of collapsing timelines. The mystery is left for the reader to decode, and while it keeps you intrigued through the middle, the end feels distant — like one more future that slipped away before it could be understood.