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By Dexter Palmer

Rebecca Steiner is married to a physicist, Philip, who is trying to create a device that is essentially a time machine, although he and his team hate it being called a time machine.

Philip Steiner's project is being funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a division of the Department of  Defense. He is in charge of a team of physicists who are making the machine, the Causality Violation Device do what Steiner's theory thinks it will do. 

Rebecca and Philip had a young son, Sean, who died in a car crash caused by a glitch in the operation of Artificial Intelligence piloted vehicles. Rebecca was the ostensible driver of the vehicle, although she was extremely inebriated and relying solely on the AI to do the driving and she was not able to take control of the vehicle quickly enough to avoid the pileup caused by the glitch.

Rebecca works from home as a customer service representative for an online dating service, Lovability. She is very good at her job and is known for her ability to talk subscribers into upgrading their subscription to more costly plans that offer more services. The author has some interesting things to say about dating services. He points out that the sites are not there to match customers to the perfect person. They have to maintain a balance between making successful matches and making too few matches. Because the longer they can keep people engaged with their site, the more data they acquire which they can then sell to interested businesses. As the author says, "So the goal is not maximum efficiency in pairing mates, but optimal inefficiency. The site maximizes revenue when takes as long as possible to make matches without taking so long that its members give up and stop using it." 

One day, Rebecca comes home earlier than she was expected.  And catches Philip having sex with a woman who is one of the physicists working on the Causality Violation Device. For revenge, she goes to his lab, intending to mess with his work. Instead, she steps inside the Causality Violation Device and back out after a few seconds.

That is the start of the second half of the novel. In which we find that the boy Sean didn't die in the crash, instead Philip was driving and he died in the crash. Which probably the best revenge a jilted wife could have on an unfaithful husband. But that is not the end of the story, there is still half the book to finish reading. The second half is titled "The Shadow Brought Backward."

This was on OK read although I thought it was way too long and delved too deeply in the private life of Rebecca and Philip. It was more like one of those dysfunctional family novels with a smidge of science fiction. I would almost call it chick lit, honestly.

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.