Marilyn Kosmatka

Marilyn Kosmatka is best known for Time Spike (2008), a novel she co-wrote with Eric Flint within Flint's Ring of Fire alternate-history franchise. The book opens a second timeline in the shared Assiti Shards universe, in which a mysterious displacement event flings a maximum-security Illinois prison, a band of Cherokee being marched along the Trail of Tears, Spanish conquistadors, and Mound Builder peoples into a Cretaceous-era landscape alongside living dinosaurs. Published by Baen, the novel weaves together the prison staff's struggle to survive and adapt, the fate of the displaced Cherokee travelers, and the efforts of present-day scientists racing to understand the anomaly while government officials try to keep it secret.