The SUNDAY TIMES bestseller
"Amazing! One of the twistiest time-tales I've ever read."
–Diana Gabaldon
"Crichtonesque thrillers don't come much better than this... Readers won't be able to turn the pages fast enough."
–Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"Are we talking plot twists? More like spirals. Gripping, clever, mind-bending stuff."
–Daily Mail
From the worldwide bestselling author of Departure and Winter World comes a standalone novel about a father and daughter trying to unravel an intricate murder mystery spread across time – with a jaw-dropping twist.
Control the past.
Save the future.
One morning, Dr. Sam Anderson wakes up to find that the woman he loves has been murdered.
For Sam, the horror is only beginning.
He and his daughter are accused of the crime. The evidence is ironclad. They will be convicted.
And so, to ensure his daughter goes free, Sam does what he must: he confesses.
But in the future, murderers aren't sent to prison.
Thanks to a machine Sam helped invent, the world's worst criminals are now sent to the past – approximately 200 million years into the past, to the dawn of the time of the dinosaurs – where they must live out their lives alone, in exile from the human race.
Sam accepts his fate.
But his daughter doesn't.
Adeline Anderson has already lost her mother to a deadly, unfair disease. She can't bear to lose her father as well.
So she sets out on a quest to prove him innocent. And to get him back. People around her insist that both are impossible tasks.
But Adeline doesn't give up. She only works harder.
She soon learns that impossible tasks are her specialty. And that she is made of tougher stuff than she ever imagined.
As she peels back the layers of the mystery that tore her father from this world, Adeline finds more questions than answers. Everyone around her is hiding a secret. But which ones are connected to the murder that exiled her father?
That mystery stretches across the past, present, and future – and leads to a revelation that will change everything.
Interesting Concepts Yet Disjointed Storytelling. This is one of those books where there is nothing objectively wrong with it, and yet it also feels a bit disjointed. Separated into several parts, it could likely have been better separated into a trilogy, with the events of Parts 1 and 2 in one book, 3 and 4 in a second book, and 5 in a final book. Then you could expand each section out beyond what was presented in even these 400 pages (since you'd arguably need at least another couple hundred or so for a third book) and really make the effort to take a good tale into the stratosphere of being among the best in scifi. Overall the specific application of time travel here was one I hadn't seen in any form since the early 2000s era Jet Li movie The One, and even here the specific direction Riddle applies is unique in my experience and intriguing overall. Ultimately this is a good tale and well told, it just seemed like it could have been better with a different editing approach. Very much recommended.
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29 August, 2022:
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