Book Review: Lost in Time by A.G. Riddle

About the Book

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 Review

I really liked the way this one started. I am a fan of Science and Technology thrillers, as well as time travel, and the combination of those things plus a cast of intriguing characters drew me in straightaway here. However, when the big reveal came, I must confess that I found it bizarre and unwieldy and while it all tied together in the end quite neatly, it felt a little too tidy and like more of a stretch than I felt the author explained to my adequate satisfaction..

I’m not exactly sure how Adeline would have figured out things as she did so quickly, and the way everything rolled out from there felt a little contrived to me. It was still wholly entertaining – don’t get me wrong – and I enjoyed the book. But it required a little more suspension of disbelief than even this type of story usually requires.

Still, the characters were a well-developed and interesting mix, and the plot was certainly original and clever. I would definitely look up Riddle again…

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my obligation-free review copy.