The modern publishing industry seems to be addicted to elevator pitches and, almost inevitably, this one is being pitched as 'Indiana Jones meets Outlander' because it happens to feature an archaeologist working through time travel. I can see that, but both those items are misleading in this context, because this plays to me more like a Clive Cussler novel starring 'The Librarians' rather than Dirk Pitt. But that's just another elevator pitch, right? Connie Willis's 'Oxford Time Travel' series would be a more accurate parallel in approach as well, maybe combined with the blockbuster thriller 'National Treasure'. And there's a third. They're easy to conjure up.

I much prefer getting my teeth into reviews and the first thing to say here is that, while this is a debut novel, I will be astounded if it isn't intended to become the first in what I firmly hope will be a long series of novels starring Rabbit Ward. He's the archaeologist in play here, classically trained and working for the Smithsonian, but, in this particular version of our world right now, they have a time machine and that means that he can go back in time. Because this is a thriller, there isn't a lot of going back just to observe, though that idea is appropriately floated here as potentially valuable and the Japanese do more of it. It's about going back to get something in particular and bring it back.

Like the 'Oxford Time Travel' series, there are rules about how this works, but they're not that hard to run through and Andrew Ludington takes an excellent approach a couple of chapters in to explain them, one that I haven't seen before. Rabbit Ward, whose name is really Robert but his little brother couldn't pronounce it and it therefore naturally stuck for life, is well-known to experts and seems like a highly worthy choice to sit on a convention panel about the subject of time-travelling archaeology. Having sat on many such panels, I'm shocked that I haven't seen it used for exposition in fiction before.

Now, we're not talking about some local Comicon. He's asked by NOGWHISTO, the Network of Global and World History Organizations, who are based at George Washington University, to be part of a panel on 'The Role of Time Travel in Academic Historical Research' at the Elliott School of International Affairs. This is high-level stuff at an academic conference but it does play out a lot like a conventional panel at a Comicon. After all, Ludington's goal here is blockbuster action-thriller not dry academic research. Even Indy's time teaching had girls painting love messages on their eyelids, right?

Anyway, time travel has been around for 27 years and is primarily funded by private sponsors. It costs a huge amount and sponsors want something back for their investment. It must be done right the first time because the Adams-Cortez Act prevents repeat visits to the same places at the same time. And they can't change anything important, as the Krishnamurthy-Chang Effect (the Splinter Effect of the title) states that doing so would cause a rift in the timeline rather like we see at the Time Variance Authority on 'Loki'.

Therefore, during his eighty missions, Rabbit has focused on things that history already tells us have disappeared, locating them and secreting them somewhere safe for his future self to dig up again. Oh, and he has to get back to his entry point by a particular time on particular day or he's stuck there forever. That would be bad and it already has been. Rabbit's still wracked with guilt for losing a former partner, Aaron Kahan, also the son of a couple of prominent sponsors.

I like this idea a lot, not least because I've put plenty of thought into how it would work, coming to exactly the same conclusions, for a book I'm planning to write. That wouldn't be this, I should add. I have a very different tone and structure and mind for mine, so Ludington hasn't stymied my efforts before I start them, but it works on the same mindset. Because Rabbit specialises in ancient Rome and Greece, he's required to be able to speak Latin and ancient Greek and have a strong grounding in how society worked back then. That could make a novel in English awkward but Ludington breezes through it without bogging anything down, just like he makes us aware how important authentic clothing and props are without the detail taking over.

We do see a lot of history, this particular mission for the Menorah of the Second Temple taking him to Constantinople in 535 CE, and it does seem a little touristy at points, but I buy into that. Rabbit is a classical scholar. Of course he's going to look at everything with wide eyes, even this many missions in. After all, because of the Adams-Cortez Act, every one of them is different. On his last mission, for instance, he was rescuing some lost plays of Sophocles before the Library of Alexandria burned, raising Genevieve Cogman's 'Invisible Library' books as a comparison.

This isn't fantasy, though. It's thoroughly based in the thriller mindset, which means action. To me, it rarely approaches 'Indiana Jones' in the way it tackles action because this isn't Saturday matinee movie serial action. It's television-friendly action, like 'The Librarians', with moments that get a little darker. Rabbit does almost get executed in public, for instance, and he does a little derring-do, but he deals with far more intrigue than fist fights. For me, this gets closest to 'Indiana Jones' in how Rabbit interacts sparingly with historical figures.

I've long adored that moment at which Indy interacts very briefly with Adolf Hitler, and Rabbit doesn't get much more time with historical figures like the Emperor Justinian, who was Roman emperor from 527 to 565 CE, or one of his principal military commanders, Gen. Belisarius. They do feature here and Rabbit does interact with them, but in keeping with the idea of not trying to change history in any substantial way, those interactions are kept very limited indeed.

I'm not an expert in Byzantine history, so I can't say how many, if any, of the other characters in play are real historical figures, but I can say that they all feel real. The most sympathetic is the young soldier he meets protecting a roadcrew repairing the Via Egnatia. Not only does he give Rabbit a ride into Constantinople and put him at his uncle's place, he becomes a pivotal part of his mission. There are others, of course, and at least one of them isn't from then. Rabbit has a nemesis, you see, and she's been playing with him on a number of missions now. And, given the unlikelihood that she murdered a man in Constantinople in 535 CE and carved a Playboy Bunny into his chest, she's presumably not the only other time traveller there.

And so it all grows. I liked this a lot, but it's a relatively easy read to devour in a sitting or two, with a surprisingly short ending. It's one of those novels that simply does what it does but no more, so the question comes down to whether you're into the idea of a series of novels about time travelling archaeologists rescuing important artefacts from the annals of history. That's so far up my alley that Ludington could have mangled this and I'd still have enjoyed it. The good news is that he did a pretty solid job, especially given that it's his debut novel, and I'm looking forward to future instalments already. And the logical TV adaptation. ~~ Hal C F Astell