BVC Presents Cover Stories: The TIME MACHINE GENE

Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
September 10, 2025

Greetings, genre fiction fans. Welcome to Cover Stories in which an author shares a book, what’s on its cover, a hint of what’s inside and some insider info on their creation.

So, what’s the book of the day?

THE TIME MACHINE GENE, a Peter August Mystery

by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff and Anthony Frangione

What’s on the cover?

The cover shows a face that is half Our Hero, and half an Egyptian life mask. Behind this blended figure are structures that span millennia, locations, and cultures. There’s also a little tiny Pony Express Rider galloping across the foreground.

Why is that? Read on.

What’s inside?

We’ll let Peter tell you…

Dreams, delusions, hallucinations … past lives? Whatever they are, I want them to stop.

I had the first “episode” when I was eight. One moment I was a kid on a seesaw, the next I was a Pony Express rider galloping across the Western plains. Harmless, right?

Not harmless. I became “the weird kid”, picked on by bullies and avoided by my alleged friends. So, I pretended I was a fledgling writer who had vivid daydreams. That actually worked for a while. Then one of my “daydreams” had me babbling ancient Egyptian in an upscale restaurant. Cost me my fiancée.

So, I moved east and started over as a detective with the NYPD. I lived alone and kept my daydreams between me and my cat. Everything was chill … until I had a major episode in the middle of a drug bust. While I was curating a museum in WWII Austria, my partner, Mel, was getting shot.

I didn’t blame Mel for requesting a new partner. Nor was I surprised when no one else raised their hand and cried, “Pick me! Pick me!”

I went on medical leave. Two therapists down the line, I found myself at the Manhattan Institute of Neuroscience, where Dr. Victoria Shehata and her team were experimenting with something called Genetic Cognitive Transference. I didn’t care what they called it. I I just wanted to make it stop.

Vic had other ideas. She was convinced my episodes weren’t just waking dreams, and that they could open a door hitherto closed to science. That’s how I found myself investigating a case that spanned centuries and threatened to change the world—and not in a good way.

Where’d all that come from?

Anthony is fascinated by what many folks think of as past life experiences. He explored the paranormal psychology angle of this in an earlier solo novel, but when we got our heads together, I proposed that we take a science fictional approach to the subject, possibly because of my own fascination with those inexplicable experiences and time travel stories.

The story grew out of the essential speculative fiction question that every writer asks themselves consciously or not: What if X happened?

In this case, the “X” was: What if this character was beset by intrusive “episodes” of his life in different time periods? How would he react? How would they affect his real world life? What would he be willing to do to figure out what the heck was going on? What if we applied scientific methods to these experiences?

And … what if Peter’s episodes started something he might have no way to stop?

With these questions in mind the book practically wrote itself. We just turned Peter loose and then followed him around. Or, as Anthony says, “Let your imagination play with history, then just write.”

What have reviewers/readers said about BOOK TITLE?

This comes to us through one of our Beta Readers…

This would make a HELL of a TV (show) or even theatrical movie! — Katharine “Cat” Eliska Kimbriel, author of NIGHT CALLS and The Chronicles of Nuala series

What else should I know?

Both Anthony and I are confirmed research junkies, so the inclusion of the real historical settings and personages Peter August experiences in his “episodes” was an indulgence neither of us could say “no” to. Part of our agenda (bwa-ha-ha-ha!) is to charm the reader into believing that any of the characters who appear on the page might be real.

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