Running Behind Time by Jan Turk PetrieMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Apologies, I have read the four books in this series back-to-back and I am no longer sure what happens in which book.
Tom Brookes has moved back to his small home Cotswold village of Stoatsfield-under-Ridge to live with his mum during the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020. Furloughed from his travel job he is drifting aimlessly. A friend offers him a potential job opportunity in London and he gets on a mostly empty train bound to London. However, when the train goes through an exceptionally long tunnel Tom finds himself inexplicably on a crowded train with people smoking and no-one wearing a facemask! After trying (and failing miserably) to buy a flat white with skinny milk at the station when he gets to London, and flabbergasted at the low prices, refused card payment by the vendor, Tom realises he is no longer in 2020, but seems somehow to have travelled back in time to 1982. He decides that the time-slip must have occurred in that long tunnel, one which he doesn't recall ever having travelled through before, and therefore logically to get back to 2020 he needs to get back on the same train going back home and recreate his every move.
Its 1982 and Beth Sawyer, an aspiring young actress, is going to Cheltenham to visit her aunt. As the train unexpectedly enters a long tunnel she stumbles and grabs hold of a young man. When they emerge from the tunnel she discovers that the train is far less crowded, her bag has disappeared, and the stranger she grabbed hold of is insisting that she has time travelled to 2020.
Having successfully returned to 2020, Tom thinks Beth can just do the same thing in reverse to return to 1982 but then there's a landslide and all London-bound trains are cancelled indefinitely.
This was an interesting twist on time-travel and I thoroughly enjoyed it, although it was never clear to me how Tom involuntarily travelled back to 1982 in the first place.
Read on my Kindle Unlimited subscription.
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