Jasper Fforde. Terry Pratchett. PG Wodehouse. Maybe even Charlaine Harris. If you like any of these authors, this book will be right up your alley--especially if you also happen to appreciate Brit-speak/humor. I won't try to explain the setting, as it jumps around through time a good bit, but I will say that the read offers excellent hilarity in an intelligent way. Ned and Verity are "Historians", time travelers who are sent about the past checking on things, verifying accounts, reviewing details. They do this by means of "the net" which opens (or not) at specific locations in particular times. This is supposed to be carefully managed, but naturally it's not or we have no story. As Ned and Verity try to correct some temporal errors, they find themselves bouncing through time and through various generations of several families--it ends up being a Wodehouse-style English-country-house farce, but as if seen through the eyes of people who have already read Wodehouse. Erudite and hysterical.