I’ve expressed my admiration for Jan Turk Petrie as a writer in the past. She has a very wide range: Dystopian Nordic Noir (I’m not sure, but I think she may have invented this genre); historical fiction; contemporary fiction – and she’s done a remarkable job in all of them. And now: Time Slip.

The idea of Time Slip is so inherently at odds with everything we know about Time (it moves in only one direction) that achieving a willing suspension of disbelief requires a very high standard of authorship. And that’s exactly what you get here. The genre shares with all other forms of fiction a need for the characters to be believable and to arouse our interest (we don’t have to like them). Running Behind Time delivers that, too.

And then there are the book’s individual pleasures. Chief, for me, was that I KNEW the secret the author was concealing about her two main characters and I was almost at the end of the book before I discovered how wrong I had been. That ability to lead the reader by the nose is one of the most valuable an author can have, and it’s – not rare, exactly, but fairly unusual.

When I’m reviewing a book, I look hard for the weakness that will allow me to reduce the rating from five stars to four. I didn’t find one here.

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Jan Turk Petrie