What good is a time machine if human beings can’t survive time travel?
I was contacted by a publicist about reviewing this book and I’m so glad I said yes! Thank you for the opportunity. My thoughts are my own and my review is honest.
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About the Book
Porters
by Patrick Clark
Published 19 September 2021
Tellwell Talent
Genre: Sci-Fi Thriller
Page Count: 215
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What good is a time machine if human beings can’t survive time travel? Evidently, there is one answer; it becomes the most effective way in history to dispose of a dead body. I mean, what could be better for a criminal than dumping their latest victim two dozen years or so into the future?
PORTERS follows forty-nine-year-old Detective Steven Wilson in the dystopian future of 2069, forty years after the invention of time travel. Wilson is the head of the NTSI (Non-Linear Time Stream Investigation Unit), a special division within the NYPD. Ultimately, 2069 has become the official dumping ground for the first wave of “time trash,” among which are numerous murder victims. It’s Wilson’s job to find out who killed them.
Wilson is one of the best there is when it comes to solving these futuristic murders and catching the killers of the past. However, when a new body arrives that suggests that he is dealing with a serial killer (a first for the NTSI), all bets are off the table. As more and more bodies pile up, Wilson discovers that someone is assisting the killer in the present time. He attempts to fight an enemy across two timelines; trying to solve a forty-year-old murder with real-time consequences while battling paradoxes that threaten the very fabric of reality.
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My Review
My Rating: 5 Stars
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Porters is a sci-fi murder mystery like none other I’ve ever read before. We’ve all read time travel stories before, but what would happen if people with less than savoury ideas about how to use such technology got ahold of it in the early days? That’s exactly what’s happened here. The bodies of murder victims are being sent decades forward in time, and for Detective Steven Wilson this case is about to get extremely personal.
Clark has done an amazing job of crafting a dystopian version of our world just a few decades into the future and fit flawed time travel experiments into Earth’s history absolutely flawlessly (pun not intended, but I’ll take it.) In a world where imperfect time travel exists and criminals have access to it, timelines are going to be pretty darn messed up, and Clark has navigated this problem with a level of skill and finesse that demonstrates the sheer amount of planning and reworking that must have gone into this book behind the scenes. I absolutely love reading books that have very clearly left a lot of content on the cutting room floor and in the archives of the author’s mind, and this is one of them. The final product has been shaped with such care, it’s perfect.
The murder mystery element is thrilling and absolutely keeps the reader turning pages. If I hadn’t started this book well after midnight and immediately after finishing another book I had been reviewing on a deadline, this would have been a one-sitting read.
The characters in this book are wonderful, too. I connected with and felt deeply for all of the main cast, and their different struggles felt very real and relatable to me. Without spoiling anything, the ending does imply other books could be written in this world, and I dearly hope that will be the case because I want to find out what these characters do next and how this version of our world moves forward after the events of this book.
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Want more? Check out The Darkness Outside Us
Sounds like a great book!