Ethan Spaulding and The Competitors

After hours of being jammed into a spider hole in Leonardo da Vinci’s studio and witnessing the moment when the Renaissance master paints the Mona Lisa smile, Ethan Spaulding finally gets the genetic samples he came for. Now if he can just get them back without dying, all will be good. When he’s not abducting the near dead, he is part of the advance team tagging artifacts and extracting DNA used to generate the famous replacement clones. Each assignment into the past is fraught with danger, but walking on the edge has always been Ethan’s way. As he becomes a more trusted member of the Institute, Ethan realizes he has taken a blood oath and there are only two ways to leave; be vaporized on a mission, or vanish like several of his compatriots if and when he screws up. Ethan is never quite sure whether the people he works with are friends or foes, and he’s starting to wonder if his benefactors are experimenting on him like they do on their newly acquired legendary guests.

The Competitors is the second book in the Ethan Spaulding series, which documents the time travel adventures of an elite group of field agents in 2163.