As a project around communications and energy comes to a close, Doctor Joan Rand is the last holdout—a researcher who insists that the project isn’t quite aligned correctly. It just needs a little more time. The doctor’s exhausted colleagues, having spent years working fifteen hours a day on the secretive project, overrule her. As a result, the government project ENet (dug into the sands of New Mexico) launches in the early hours of May 30, 2006. Meanwhile, in the desert, a liaison between the Navajo locals and the police notices changes almost immediately: animals emerge from the ground and then promptly disappear; a famous local tree that has long been covered with decorative metal and used as a local meeting place disappears entirely; and a body is soon discovered nearby. The air is tingling.
After the launch of a local police investigation that simply follows procedure while observing the oddity of the events that have unfolded, it soon becomes clear there is something much bigger at play. Every 24 hours, more people (and things in general) are absorbed by this new energy center, with nothing left to suggest where they’ve gone. Two key priorities emerge: stop the phenomenon from expanding in a daily burst of ever-growing circles, and work out where its early victims have gone. Once some of the lost objects have been found, the protagonists try to work out who the mysterious grey figures (who seem to be carefully guarding the objects) are.
J.N. Frye’s debut novel, A FLASH IN TIME, sometimes feels a little cliched—the lightly rebellious cop, the protesting insider, the inspired leader—but makes up for it by feeling truly unexpected in other places. It’s impressive in its scope and (without offering anything groundbreaking) winds up as a hugely rewarding read for anyone with a love for mystery, inventiveness, and fast-paced thriller-type stories.
As the novel proceeds, there are GPS failings, sightings that test the locals’ faith in their own eyes, and even the distortion of time itself. The experiment in energy soon becomes something that feels unstoppable, warping the very air its characters breathe. Taking some strange turns in a weaving plot, the novel’s world slowly expands from something local to something all-encompassing—giving the sense of a horrible supernatural disaster unfolding.
An inventive and manically fast-paced thriller with the feel of a Hollywood movie, J.N. Frye’s A FLASH IN TIME is exciting, nerdy, energetic, and engaging.
~James Hendicott for IndieReader