From the New York Times bestselling author of ‘The Club’ comes a gripping mystery about time travel tourism and the dangerous consequences that ensue when the privileged make the past their playground.
Ellery Lloyd, an increasingly well-known pseudonym for the husband-and-wife writing team of Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos, authors of the New York Times bestselling book ‘The Club,’ brings home yet another absorbing tale of intrigue and deception. For lovers of time travel yarns, ‘Time to Burn’ makes for compelling reading in a category that never seems to get old.
Inigo Frank, the founder of Tempus Tours – an entrepreneurial start-up that caters, by necessity, to the ultra-wealthy – offers highly regulated experiences back to precise destinations in the past. One might describe the business as a niche, which it is, except that the price tag for any excursion would be obscenely, prohibitively expensive for anyone other than about 0.0000527 percent of the human population. In other words, quite exclusive – hardly surprising, given the rampant excesses routinely displayed by modern-day wealthy folks that make the Gilded Age look like amateur hour. Such is the backdrop for this fine adventure, which periodically sneaks in social commentary regarding wealth inequality in the 21st century.
Like a lot of CEOs, Inigo is not all that he seems. A mathematics whiz, he abandoned his Ph.D. studies to secure financial support for his daring brainchild. Although suffering numerous rejections, Frank eventually assembles enough deep-pocketed individuals – who actually wield more resources than many world governments – to get his enterprise off the ground.
The rags-to-riches saga attracts the attention of award-winning documentary filmmaker Phoebe Hunt, who agrees to put the inner workings of Tempus Tours on full display with the complete blessing of its founder. As Inigo says to Phoebe, he wants the account told warts and all. Given’s Phoebe’s track record as an authentic chronicler of historical events, she wouldn’t have it any other way.
The story begins with a glimpse into the brief life of brilliant mathematician Francesco Molinari awaiting guests for dinner. Instead, he finds himself unexpectedly accosted by a hooded gunman, after which the page goes blank. Molinari, as it turns out, has taken the first steps to unraveling the riddle of time travel, serving as the inspiration years later for Inigo Frank’s quest to solve the conundrum.
This third legally authorized excursion by Tempus Tours into the past takes place in war-torn London during the Blitz. Tom Walker, the Tempus guide, has escorted four patrons into the basement lounge of a club called Café de Paris for dinner but not dessert, because it would be too chancy to stay that long. It is March 8, 1941, and the air raid sirens in the streets above have already sounded. While the first two trips to London in the 1940s were relatively innocuous, this one – at the client’s insistence – entails substantially more risk in the middle of the battle-weary city. In just moments, soon after the Tempus group departs, very many of the café’s patrons will be dead.
Real estate magnate Harry Allen, who has funded this excursion, is accompanied by his much younger girlfriend Beatrice Downing, his son Luke, and Luke’s wife Sasha. Harry is a World War II buff, clearly enamored by the opportunity to experience history up close and personal. Despite the obvious perils, research conducted by Tempus staff has alleviated most of them. Archival records, for example, indicate where the bombs dropped – and more importantly, where they did not – on this particular day, and correspondingly, which edifices remained intact, thus representing relative safety to and from the temporal portal.
As the party leaves the club, clearly any number of things could still go wrong, which they do. Sasha’s husband Luke is impaled by a large shard of glass, dangerously close to his femoral artery. When Sasha grabs at the glass in a vain attempt to remove it, her hand gets deeply sliced as well. Tom ushers the group to the exit tube, undamaged since before the war, which leads to the aperture that will enable their return to the present day. Because of the enormous quantity of energy required, the aperture can remain open for only a finite period – barely more than ten minutes – before the laws of physics force it shut. When the group reassembles on the other side of the aperture amid the chaos – in the present – someone is missing: Sasha. She is stuck in 1941.
The story jumps to and fro between present and past to good effect. The reasons Sasha stays behind form the core of the narrative, though her plight is intertwined with Inigo, Phoebe, and her love interest, David, an investigative reporter for the Financial Times. While David serves as a valuable counsel and resource for Phoebe, stuff that happened previously, differently, botches up their relationship, once more serving as a warning for interfering with timelines.
Phoebe and Sasha had troubled childhoods for different reasons. As it turns out, they knew each other as teenagers, both having grown up in sort of a commune or collective, albeit in a fashionable London neighborhood. Sasha’s mother, Lulu Fraser, joins the Living Family founded by Roger Hunt, Phoebe’s father, intertwining the girls’ lives. As the narrative charts the exploits between 1941 and the present day, the authors do an admirable job of keeping the proceedings in clear focus.
When Phoebe interviews Inigo about how much it costs to keep the aperture open, she is astounded at the price tag per minute. Inigo corrects her by saying that the astronomical figure is not per minute – it’s the cost per SECOND. Similar to folks who fly into low Earth orbit for fun and pay with the equivalent of pocket change, Tempus patrons have no problem doling out whatever more would be necessary to journey to the past.
As with many, if not most, time-travel plots, changes made in previous years or decades reverberate into the present. Noteworthy films along these lines include “Frequency,” with Dennis Quaid and Jim Caviezel, and “The Butterfly Effect,” with Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart, both of which explore how small variations in the past can affect the future. Lloyd ably examines these concepts in the novel.
‘Time To Burn’ is the kind of page-turner that makes it hard to put down. Not only are the characters well drawn, but their motivations also pull readers further and further into the tangle. The book takes an oft-used premise and confidently goes off-script, avoiding clichés and mapping fresh territory. Cerebral, witty, and full of fun, ‘Time to Burn’ – with its engaging and enjoyable prose – brings aficionados a very cool new addition to the SF genre.
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