I would like to thank Head of Zeus for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher - Head of Zeus

Published - Out Now

Price - £16.99 hardback £4.79 Kindle eBook

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.

Time travel is an attraction not just to experience the past or future that our linear lives will never see but also a chance to fix time. To out right all the mistakes, shouldas, wouldas and couldas we know ultimately were the bad calls. In A G Riddle’s science fiction novel we get a thriller that has one daughter’s struggle to set things right but sadly for me gave me unfortunate glimpses of deja vu.

In the near future Absolom is the newest scientific discovery aiming to make the world a better place. Six brilliant minds created a system that allows the world to send our worst criminals and human monsters back in time into a splintered alternative universe. A threat so great it has made crime rates fall. However one of the Abs0lom 6 is Dr Sam Anderson a widower with two young children. He has started a relationship with another of the six Nora and caused the immense anger of his teenage daughter Adeline. Nora is found mysteriously dead and the evidence points to Sam and Adeline as culprits. Suspecting he is being framed Sam claims it was all his idea then he is sent back to the age of the dinosaurs. Adeline then slowly and patiently puts steps in place to get to the truth, rescue her father and find the true secrets of Absolom.

I am afraid this really did not grab me for multiple reasons. Most of all this a story without any real characters in it. Sam and Adeline are a stereotypical father daughter you would find in a middle of the road movie. Things happen to them and they react. At no time do they nor any other characters really feel more than plot devices. Everyone sounds the same when they are talking. They all fall into my personal distaste of explaining science in artificial long sentences.

It is flat on atmosphere. This is a story that reminds me of 1950-60s SF a smart idea with a plot loosely bolted on it. The plot idea is all and Riddle labours leadenly to make it all fit together. Why exactly do we need to send people to the dinosaur age? Its unclear. The science is fairly scant and instead an opportunity to have Sam play intrepid survivor. Adeline has a slightly more interesting plot to navigate and there is a neat (but predictable) idea here but its not got enough story for a novel and really this feels like an overlong novella or short story. As a thriller it is not tense and while the ending could be seen as heart-warming; instead I found it a tale of rich people and their businesses helping to make things better I find a little clunky in the 2020s. This feels like a mid-table Twilight Zone episode and the world is very bland wooden sets. You also have to think when you get the resolution was that really the best way to do things?

I cannot recommend this. I would say if you like SF more focused on talking and exploring a loose scientific concept the it may be worth a look but for me I think it will not last long in the memory or be a book long discussed in the future.