There was something decidedly unusual about the dead body found floating off the coast of Cuba. The wool of his garment, while only twenty years old, was from an animal extinct for over nine thousand years. A group of professional scuba divers, including Lord Henry Basingstoke and his friend, Rodrigo Quintas, eagerly search the ocean bed for clues. But when they find a mysterious underwater vehicle, a fun vacation becomes an obsessive quest to be the first to solve the mystery. A daring journey back through time takes them to a hidden land of rainforests, deadly creatures, and a doomed civilization. A place where nothing is what it seems. And the longer they stay, the more their adventure becomes, quite literally, a race against time.

Taking careful inventory of our supplies, I nibbled a chocolate Bourbon biscuit Rodrigo gave me. Each now dressed in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt--his was cream, mine was maroon--we flung the heavy bags over our shoulders and sauntered up the verge toward the forest.

As we approached the first emerald thicket, I slowed to a creep. The place seemed conspicuously quiet, and I sensed we were being watched.

"Keep a sharp eye," I said, wrenching a rotten branch to one side. "We're not alone."

The oppressive gloom ahead felt thick, tropical, over-cooked: a hotbed of stakes holding up an evergreen roof. Rodrigo stretched the front of his t-shirt to soak up sweat from his forehead. Our guns handy, we pressed on. After a while, insect noises drowned out the silence.

The first half hour was hard going. Without a machete, forging a route through the brush proved taxing. On some of the taller trees, the buttress roots were so pronounced we had to negotiate an insanely convoluted route just to walk around them. Rodrigo explained how these buttresses provide stability for tropical rainforest trees, whose roots are ordinarily not as deep as those in temperate zones. Apparently, these ridges can reach thirty feet in height before blending fully into the trunk; the highest we came across was closer to fifteen feet.

Rays of intense sunlight extended to the forest floor every now and then, illuminating all manner of insects and dry particles in the air, similar to a cinema projection beam in a darkened theatre. As we stopped to rest, I tried to absorb as much of this humid realm as I could.

"I wonder how much of this is extinct in our own time," I said.

Rodrigo sighed. "We're talking paleobotany come to life, that's for sure. I didn't even realize there was ever a land mass where we're standing, so Christ only knows how far back this is."

"Tell me about it. Dumitrescu said the fabric was from an animal that vanished nine thousand years ago. He never said how long the species was actually around."

"Would it have made a difference?" Rodrigo asked.

"Probably not."

"Well, I have to say, Baz, this is the most reckless time travel I've ever been a part of."

I laughed. "Don't thank me now. We're not even lost yet."

His faced remained deadpan as he shook his head and replied, "English optimism."

A remarkable acoustic effect was created by the dainty chirruping of birds we could only partially glimpse, perched high above us, atop lofty lianas. These adaptive, draping vines either climbed into the tree canopy, reaching for sunlight, or started life already up there and sent roots down to the ground.

Rodrigo took to naming new, strikingly colored species of birds he spotted through these creepers as a means of keeping his spirits up. It proved a helpful distraction for me, also, from the ever-so-elusive rustling sound I swore kept pace on either side. By the time our path opened up into a stunning glade awash in a deluge of sunlight, my friend had named over a dozen fresh, possibly endemic, species: 'Nice With Soya Sauce', 'Robin Under-the-Hood' and 'Luke Vinewalker' are the ones I can recall.

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Reviewer: Stacey

Lord Henry Basingstoke is a wealthy archaeologist who’s never shied away from danger. He and his wealthy friends have their own club. The year is 1979 and they are meeting in Romania for a party and their host presents them with an enigma—a dead man found floating in the ocean near Cuba. He’s badly burned and wearing a strange outfit made of the wool of an animal that has been extinct for nine thousand years, but the fabric is only twenty years old. Lord Basingstoke and his friends Sam and Ethel Brooke and Rodrigo head out to search the ocean and what Lord Basingstoke finds is beyond anything he could have imagined—a time machine. But where will this strange, invisible device take him, and will he be able to come home again?

The Basingstoke Chronicles is a bit cliché, and full of musing on science and time travel, but an interesting read none-the-less. There are some creative aspects, like the Tongue of Deceit, but a lot of the story is pretty predictable. There’s a bit too much talking and not enough action—time jumps by months at a time from one conversation to another without much actually happening throughout the story. Without giving away the ending, they go back in time and find the people from that time, learn to live with them, then must escape a disaster and try to find a way home. Even the place they end up being in is really predictable. I’m sure anyone who reads a lot of sci-fi or fantasy could figure it out just from this summary. I figured it out from the first chapter. But it is a relatively interesting take on a tale that has piqued human intrigue for centuries, and worth the read for anyone who likes time travel stories. I assume, from the fact that title implies chronicles, that there will be a sequel, and that this is just the first story in a series. If that’s the case, it leaves a nice opening for further adventures. If not, though, it’s got a pretty lame ending.

* Disclosure: Reviewers are compensated for book reviews.

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