If you’re the kind of reader who likes to become totally immersed in a book, Ellery Lloyd’s new time-travel crime thriller Time to Burn could be just what you’re waiting for. Crime Fiction Lover reviews have jumped into other future-oriented techno-thrillers, teetering on the edge of science fiction, such as The Blockchain Syndicate and Quantum of Menace, and this one really captured my imagination, even though I have a big dose of scepticism when it comes to time travel. The basic idea is appealing, but given the past eras I’d most want to visit, what would hold me back is the lack of modern plumbing.
Time travellers in this story, however, go back only 85 years, to 1941 London in the midst of the blitz, and to 2007 just prior to a catastrophic house fire. 1941 seems like an inauspicious temporal destination, no? Well, they have their reasons, and that’s where the crimes begin.
As you might imagine, it’s complicated. One of the joys of any book taking place in several time periods – three in this one – is testing whether the author can actually pull it off. For example, did a character visiting the World War II era take out a cell phone? I’m pleased to tell you, none did. Nor did I detect any less obvious anachronisms, except for one minor one near the end.
In the present day of the story, never exactly specified, time travel has become commercially viable, a super-expensive destination vacation for the super-wealthy. Tempus Tours has been created and turned into a business by scientist-entrepreneur Inigo Frank. Frank has consented to having a no-holds-barred documentary made about him and his business by award-winning filmmaker Phoebe Hunt. Much of the story is told from Phoebe’s point of view – her observations, her interviews, her growing list of questions and suspicions. She’s smart, conscientious and not afraid to admit any shortcomings.
Tempus Tours, whatever its attractions, is a highly regulated business. Society is rightly concerned that the ‘tourists’ may inadvertently, or even deliberately, change something in the past that cascades unpredictably into the present day. Think, for example, what would happen if someone went back to the early 1930s and murdered Hitler or back to 1963 and prevented the Kennedy assassination. Plenty of people have wanted to do both these things, but if they did, everything we know today would be different, and if you’ve read Stephen King’s 11/22/63, not necessarily better. A reservation Inigo Frank may not share.
So, strict regulations presumably in force, Phoebe is on hand to film the return of a group of five from 1941, a real estate magnate and his wife, his son and daughter-in-law, and their tour leader. The airlock door whooshes open. Only four travelers emerge, one badly injured and needing hospitalisation. The son’s young wife is not among them. She’s now abandoned in wartime London, decades before she’s actually born.
It’s the nightmare everyone – politicians and the public alike – has feared. Everyone except the missing woman herself, Sasha Allen. By not returning, she has accomplished the first step in her own audacious plan, which, over the course of the book, is gradually revealed in its dazzling complexity. Paradoxically, it’s also quite simple in concept.
Sasha’s World War II adventure is interspersed with the story of how Phoebe became an award-winning documentarian. Her most famous project was a 2023 Netflix film called A Complicated Man, about her father. He was the founder and guiding light of an experiment in communal living called The Living Family. Its members lived in Central London, apparently quite happily, until an explosion and fire burned their house to the ground.
Phoebe’s mother died in the fire, a young man who’d recently joined the group was stabbed to death, her father disappeared and the safe that contained the assets of all the residents, apparently a quite substantial amount, was empty. Despite an extensive manhunt, he has never been found. Though the ensuing investigation could not definitively conclude that he set the fire, he was branded a thief and a murderer.
When Phoebe sees a picture of Sasha Allen, she recognises her immediately. They grew up together in The Living Family and were teenage adversaries. One of the cardinal rules of documentary-making Phoebe has learned is: ‘observe only, don’t interfere.’ So, she doesn’t tell anyone that she knows the missing woman. At any point, if her knowledge may make a difference in helping Sasha, in retrieving her, she will reveal what she knows. Otherwise, no.
Little anomalies – ‘glitches,’ they’re called – are occurring in people’s lives, where their memories don’t quite jibe with their realities. People aware of these glitches believe time travel is rippling the current of human events. Frighteningly, Phoebe’s boyfriend David has been caught in one of these glitches. At some point his future took a different path than the one that brought him into her life, and now he barely knows her. She’s determined to find that point of divergence and change it. Imagine introducing yourself to a stranger and trying to explain that you were lovers in another reality. As with so many aspects of this engaging story, the author handles this very cleverly.
Ellery Lloyd is the pen name of married couple Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos, and together they have written three previous books. I would love to have heard the dinner table discussions as they worked out the plot intricacies on this one! They wisely head off sceptics like me by including an epigram in which theoretical physicist, mathematician and expert thinker Stephen Hawking suggested time travel may be possible. Bona fides established, they zip along to show you what some of the consequences might be. Time to Burn is both intellectually interesting and a crackling good story.
For more cutting edge though perhaps more realistic technology in crime fiction see Body of Lies by Jo Callaghan or Divinity Games by Lou Gilmond.
Macmillan
Print/Kindle
£5.99
CFL Rating: 5 Stars
