Okay readers, since the third book in the series TIMERIDERS: THE DOOMSDAY CODE has just been released perhaps it’s time for a ‘story so far’ reminder of what’s happened in book 1 and 2. If you’re new to the series and hate spoilers, turn away now. If on the other hand you want to get yourself up to speed ready for book 3…read on…
And check back tomorrow for an exclusive interview and giveaway!
Book1: TimeRiders
Liam O’Connor, a steward aboard the Titanic, Maddy Carter a computer programmer aboard a doomed passenger plane and Saleena Vikram an Indian girl from 2026, have all been ‘recruited’ from the final seconds of their lives to work for a covert agency tasked with preventing time travellers from the future changing history for their own ends. Waking up from their traumatic ‘extraction’ they find themselves in an archway beneath a bridge in New York. And the old man who recruited them, Foster, immediately begins their training. Theirs is a team – one of many supposedly – expected to work in complete isolation. They’re located in Brooklyn in New York and the date is September the 11th, 2001. They’re in a two-day bubble of time, the day before and the day of 9/11! For them time will repeatedly loop through those two days as they learn every single detail of how those two days are supposed to go.
It’s not long before Sal, the team’s ‘observer’ spots a difference in their two day bubble, a sign that history has been subtly changed. Still fresh from a crash course of training, Maddy detects the origin of the change in history and Liam, and the fourth member of their team, Bob (a ‘support unit’ – a genetically engineered ‘heavy’ with a computer chip for a brain) are sent back to 1943 to prevent a squad of neo-nazis from helping Hitler win WWII. It’s a narrow run thing, but Liam and Bob eventually manage to correct the course of history, but not before Maddy and Sal, still in 2001, see a time-wave altering New York to a horrific new version of itself…as incorrect history plays itself out to the present.
Liam returns from the mission, history corrected, but with nothing left of Bob, but the bloodied computer chip, dug out of his head. All that is left of him. But all is not lost, a replacement body can be grown, and the data on the chip that represents Bob’s newly evolved AI personality can be installed into a new body.
With order finally restored, New York back to its normal self, Foster decides his freshly recruited team can handle themselves and decides to leave them to it. Over a good bye coffee, he explains to Maddy that she’s the team leader, she’s in charge. He explains he has to go…that the affects of the force field that loops the archway back every 48 hours has a long term corrosive affect on the body…as does time travel itself. He must leave, while he still has a few weeks of life left. He parts with a truth…time travel will eventually kill Liam. That’s the dark nature of the technology
Book two: TimeRiders: Day of the Predator
Maddy has taken charge and done her best to get up to speed on how the agency and the technology operates. First order of business is growing a new Bob! A new genetic embryo is prepped for growth and taken to nearly a full growth cycle when disaster strikes. A message from the future, from the agency. Something has happened in 2016; a young student called Edward Chan who is destined to write a degree thesis that will go on to form the foundation of time travel theory has been assassinated during a high school field trip to a science laboratory in Texas. It is suspected that anti-time travel terrorists from the future are responsible. The team decide to send Liam and the new support unit forward to 2016 to thwart the attempt on Chan’s life. However, getting ready to ‘hatch’ the new support unit they discover it’s female, not male. They went and selected the wrong sex embryo to activate. With no time to grow a new one, they go with the female support unit, which they name ‘Becks’. Liam and Becks manage to intervene to save Chan’s life, but a mistake by Maddy, attempting to bring them back to 2001 results in both of them, Chan, the entire high school class and two teachers being beamed back 65 million years to the late cretaceous!
Maddy is distraught. She’s dumped them somewhere, more precisely, somewhen in history and there’s no knowing when!
For Liam, Becks and the others, it’s a desperate struggle for survival while they figure out how they’re going to help Maddy find them. Liam suggests the idea of leaving a carefully placed message containing a calculation of the approximate millennium they’re stuck in, that will eventually, hopefully, become a fossil that will one day be discovered by palaeontologists. Against all odds the plan turns out to be successful, the message finds it’s way to Maddy and Sal and they’re able to zero in on the precise date and open a portal to bring the few survivors home. Edward Chan is returned to his future time to one day write his physics degree paper.
Order once more restored, there’s a decision to be made. Should they keep Becks, or recycle her body and grow a Bob. They decide to keep her AND revive Bob. There’s nothing in the their team’s hand book that says they can’t have two support units.
Maddy manages to locate the old man Foster in New York, and tell him about their last adventure. It’s then Foster drops a bombshell for Maddy. Liam is Foster. They’re the same person!
Book Three: TimeRiders: The Doomsday Code
The adventure continues when some code-hacker student manages to decode a sentence from the Voynich Manuscript, a real document from the dark ages that has yet to be successfully deciphered. In the one sentence he decodes lies a shocking secret that could change the entire course of history….!