SEQUENCE

A book of two strands and timeframes some 30 years apart which eventually come together, can really only be about travelling back and forth in time - can’t it?

Well, not really. In ‘Sequence’, Adrian Dawson demonstrates that bringing together a crime puzzle and a scientific mystery in perfectly credible circumstances spanning a 30-year ‘gap’, is entirely possible.

One of the big questions involving time travel is, if one can go back, why not alter the course of history – hopefully for the better? The answer is, you can’t. What’s done is done, especially if we know about it. However, what is possible (and ably demonstrated here), is that someone can go back in time and alter circumstances in such a way that the history we know remains the same, but has in effect been influenced by the future, thus ensuring a different outcome to what might have been the case.

The main theme of this though-provoking book is the existence of a set of tables which hold the answer to the whole of mankind. The person who holds the tables, it is believed, will hold the universe in their hand. Tie that together with a very earth-bound crime – a dead body holding an obscure script in Latin, and you have a double puzzle.

For LAPD Detective Nick Lambert, in June 2011, finding the body is the start of another case, especially when his investigations bring him in contact with the enigmatic Sarah Fiddes and her mute, savante sister, Tina.

For scientist Josef Klein (in LA in 2040), unearthing a supposed piece of space rock with unusual qualities is the start of a very different sort of quest, and one which soon becomes an obsession.

But these two worlds are not as distant as the dates might suggest, and one impacts greatly on the other, with amazing results.

I have too many questions about the whole fascinating concept of time travel to be at all good for my sanity, too many ‘what ifs?’ without resorting to strong drink. But this book was surprising, in that it opened up a channel of thought that I hadn’t considered before. It also did much more, in that it introduced a set of characters set very much in their own time, characters taken by levels of obsession, belief, conviction – call it what you will – which come across as entirely believable.

Thought provoking and tense.