Jackson Traine is suffering with the PTSD caused by seeing his brother maimed and murdered by a gang of thugs. Now a trained counsellor and lecturer, Traine deals with his own demons by trying to help others. When he’s asked to assist scientist Lena Cortland with secret experiments using a particle accelerator, he’s as beguiled by her looks as he is intrigued by her interest in his therapeutic work on past life regression. After one of his brother’s assailants appears in her lab and tries to kidnap him, an accident with the accelerator reveals that Traine has the ability to jump back ten minutes in time. With this power Traine is gifted the opportunity to wind time back and lead an escape before the thug even makes his move. But why was the man coming for him after all these years and why does Traine get the idea that his brother may still be alive?
Terry Hayman’s JUMPBACK is a contemporary thriller with an added sci-fi element. Other than Traine’s supernatural ability to step back in time, this is a resolutely recognizable world including such up-to-the minute scene settings as masking, social-distancing regulations and other pandemic protocols. JUMPBACK is the first of a proposed series of books and as such author Hayman spends a lot of time building Traine’s world and developing the characters that will drive the narrative in future books. The nefarious mobsters, the Demon Monks, are well drawn, as is the shadowy tribalized gangland underground in which they reign. The blossoming relationship between Traine and Cortland is perhaps given just a little too much room resulting in, if not a complete slamming on of the brakes then at least some moments where a foot hits the pedal and slows the action down to a crawl. And because of these pacing issue, though always intriguing, the novel is never as completely gripping as it could be.
One of the enjoyable things about literature concerned with time travel is trying to unpick and untangle the anomalous conundrums that breaking the time line throws up. In JUMPBACK Traine’s powers only allow him to travel back a very short period. In practice this means that rather than being able to return to a point in time that would allow him an opportunity to plan what he was going to do, he has to instead instantly reset in the moment when things start to go wrong. This is analogous to a computer games player hitting the restart button on a level they haven’t quite mastered. Indeed, one of the most effective sections of the book, where Traine has to infiltrate and then escape a maze-like industrial space, is reminiscent of a Doom style first person shooter. This frequent resetting and repeating of events is mostly very effectively handled by Hayman creating a disorienting sense of confusion in the reader akin to that which the character must be feeling. There are a handful of moments though where the trick seems overused and a sense of simple repetition deadens its impact.
With so much care taken in creating the character and his surroundings it’s a shame that the novel ends leaving many more questions than answers. Whether the reader will wish to ride this particular Traine further along the track will depend on how interested they are in finding out those answers. Rather than a wholly self-contained episode of a longer narrative arc, JUMPBACK reads as a slightly frustrating open ended introduction.
With JUMPBACK, the first book in a series that lays the groundwork for Jackson Traine, Terry Hayman has created a contemporary crime thriller and added a time-travelling twist that is both is engaging and enjoyable.
~Kent Lane for IndieReader