The Anubis Gates

Really more like 2.5 stars.

This book had a lot of interesting ideas, such as magic undergoing some sort of reversal around the birth of Christ, but most of the interesting ideas either weren't explored enough in favor of the swashbuckling adventures of the time-traveling protagonist, who I never really took a shining to.
Brendan Doyle always seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and somehow survive by the skin of his teeth. He's not really that likeable, has some tragic backstory about his wife that is set up to be super-traumatic but barely plays into his character, and becomes annoyingly fatalistic in the second half of the book. I think it says something that I often found myself rooting for the antagonists, who always (from their perspective) got the short end of the stick from this annoyingly persistent and should-be-harmless protagonist, and most of whom have the sympathetic goal of rewriting history so that Egypt maintains its independence from British rule.

Reading the other reviews, apparently this is often described as a steampunk book, but it is really not in the slightest, so if that's what you're in it for, look elsewhere. All in all, it was a decently interesting book that kept me reading more from a passing “let's see what happens” as opposed to an attachment to any particular character or plot-thread.