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.
My thoughts: as anyone who has ever watched even one episode of Doctor Who knows, time travel is never easy or straightforward (or backward). And in this book, every time the Absolom machine sends someone back in time to prehistoric Earth, it creates a bubble universe, an offshoot of the timeline as we know it.
When one of the founders of Absolom is sent back, convicted of a murder he didn’t commit, his friends and daughter try to find a way to rescue him. Absolom is one way trip only. Or is it?
This is a bit of a confusing book at times and as long as you don’t get too hung up on the science (want to upset a physicist – give them a book about time travel – honestly they get so cross) then it’s quite fun and clever.
Adeline ends up being the hero – not the petulant 19 year old she starts off as, thankfully. And the others, while full of secrets and hiding things, aren’t nearly as awful and self absorbed as first impressions make them.
Still not too keen on the Absolom concept – banishment to a brutal distant past seems really cruel, even for criminals, with no way back. What happens if they’re wrongfully convicted? Juries and judges are easily swayed. And we know it happens.
But the more human story of Sam and Adeline’s plans to rescue her dad is enjoyable and cleverly done.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 