Time to Burn

Set in a near-future world where commercial time travel has become a reality, the novel opens with a brief prologue in 1972. Professor Francesco Molinari, a self-taught mathematical prodigy at Imperial College London, prepares a dinner party for guests from the future. Before he can write the invitation, someone arrives at his door holding a gun.

The story jumps to 8 March 1941, during the London Blitz. Tom Walker, a history PhD and tour guide for Tempus Tours, leads four wealthy clients through the Café de Paris, a nightclub about to be bombed. Tempus sends clients into the past via temporary rifts in space-time called apertures. Tom's group includes Harry Allen, a property mogul; Harry's girlfriend, Beatrice Downing; Harry's son, Luke Allen; and Luke's wife, Sasha Lavrova, who claims to be the daughter of a Belarusian oligarch. Walking back toward the aperture, Luke is seriously injured by flying glass, and Sasha cuts her hand trying to help him. The group reaches the aperture with seconds to spare, but Sasha deliberately slips away, having planned her disappearance in advance.

In the present, documentary filmmaker Phoebe Hunt arrives at Tempus headquarters to film a project proposed by the company's founder, Inigo Frank. She witnesses the group's chaotic return with Sasha missing and films the crisis meeting Inigo convenes. When Sasha's passport photo appears, Phoebe recognizes her not as an oligarch's daughter but as a girl she grew up with at Parkholme House, a Victorian mansion that housed the Living Family, a communal society founded by Phoebe's father, Roger Hunt. Roger disappeared after a devastating 2007 fire that killed Phoebe's mother, Mary, and was believed to have fled with the community's savings.

Phoebe carries deep guilt over Sasha's past. As a teenager, jealous over the attention paid to Sasha by Sam Fielding, a charismatic newcomer to the commune, Phoebe locked Sasha in the attic. When the fire broke out, Mary ran back into the burning building to rescue Sasha and died. Sasha survived by climbing out a window but broke her back in the fall.

Interspersed throughout are excerpts from Phoebe's earlier documentary, A Complicated Man, revealing the commune's history: how Roger's brother Stuart Hunt, a wealthy lawyer, joined the group; and how Sam charmed the teenagers while an older boy named Jake Barrett warned Roger about Sam's behavior.

In 1941, Sasha executes an elaborate scheme. Using a key found at Parkholme House, she opens a Harrods safe deposit box containing old banknotes. She prevents Beatrice's grandfather, Albert Downing, from stealing a charity collection tin, the petty theft that would have seeded his property fortune. Through the law firm Wilson & Watkins, she purchases houses across London from owners she knows will die without heirs, setting up trusts designed to make her wealthy in the present. She hides a cigarette tin containing a newspaper clipping of Sam's murdered body beneath a floorboard in the Parkholme House summer house, hoping he will find it and flee before the fire. Before leaving, she scratches a rescue message on the station wall and places a cryptic ad to guide Tempus to it.

Phoebe witnesses a disturbing phenomenon: Beatrice vanishes midsentence and is replaced by a woman named Eleanor, now occupying Beatrice's role as Harry's girlfriend, whom everyone else accepts without question. Phoebe, the only one who retains memories of Beatrice, connects the shift to Sasha's interference with Albert Downing's past. A man named Lucian, who approaches Phoebe and identifies himself as a 'glitcher' who monitors Tempus for timeline anomalies, warns her that someone was left behind.

Tempus retrieves Sasha, who is gravely ill with sepsis. That same day, David Langley, Phoebe's boyfriend of five years and a journalist at the Financial Times, calls with urgent news, but before they can meet, he texts: "Sorry, who is this?" Phoebe's flat shows no trace of him, and she still smokes, a habit she quit only because of David.

Phoebe contacts Lucian, who reveals he is Francesco Molinari. Inigo kidnapped Molinari at gunpoint in 1972, forced him to write a suicide note, brought him to the present with promises of cancer treatment, and claimed all credit for the time travel technology.

Phoebe tracks David down and, using recorded memories of intimate details about his life, convinces him she is telling the truth. Together they identify the divergence point: A cyclist crashed into David before a key job interview and gave him drugged water, causing him to fail. Phoebe recognizes the cyclist's spider tattoo as belonging to Harry's driver, realizing Harry arranged the sabotage through an illegal Tempus trip called a shadow trip.

Through Sasha's comatose reflections, her backstory emerges. Her mother was sectioned after embezzling funds during a manic episode. Sasha found the Harrods key while cleaning her mother's house and devised her plan after reading about Harry's upcoming Tempus trip. She engineered a meeting with Luke, proposed the property scheme, and secured his cooperation by revealing that Luke, as a child visiting Parkholme House on the day of the fire, had tampered with the boiler, inadvertently causing the blaze.

Phoebe and David track down Glynn Hasker, a convicted arsonist and former fixer for Harry. Glynn reveals that Harry hired Sam to infiltrate the commune and that during the redevelopment of Parkholme House, builders found Roger's body in a pond with a bullet hole in his forehead. Harry paid Glynn to dispose of the body. Roger never fled; he was murdered.

Phoebe assembles a rough cut of her documentary exposing Inigo's crimes and sends it as leverage, demanding a shadow trip to 11 June 2007, the day of the fire. Facing an agonizing choice between restoring her relationship with David and saving her parents, she chooses her parents.

Traveling back to 2007, Phoebe discovers the truth: It was Stuart, not Roger, who used the commune as a front for wealthy men to hide assets from divorcing wives. Stuart retrieves a gun from a desk drawer and tries to shoot Sam, but it does not fire because Phoebe has already unloaded it. He bludgeons Sam unconscious and locks him and Roger in the safe. When the fire erupts from young Luke's boiler tampering, Phoebe cracks the safe combination using the newspaper photograph from Sasha's cigarette tin and frees them. Roger drags Sam to safety, rushes back in to rescue Jake, and dies on the lawn from his injuries, with Phoebe at his side. Before leaving, Phoebe slips a letter into Sasha's childhood backpack asking a favor.

The favor completes a chain spanning decades. During her time in 1941, Sasha instructed Wilson & Watkins to hire a private investigator to photograph whoever visited Molinari's flat on 12 April 1972. The photographs capture Inigo kidnapping Molinari at gunpoint. The firm held them for over fifty years until David collected them, providing evidence that leads to a police raid on Tempus.

In the epilogue, Phoebe returns to a transformed present. Her father is remembered as a hero. Stuart is in prison. Her mother is alive, living on a farm in Wales. Phoebe and David attempt a first date at the wine bar where they originally met; David has fragmentary memories of their former life but feels an instinctive trust in her. Sasha and Luke dine at the Café de Paris, Sasha's fortune secured, their waitress a now-ordinary Beatrice Downing. Inigo, cornered by police, escapes through a randomized aperture, wiping Tempus's systems. He washes up on the banks of the River Fleet in what appears to be the seventeenth century, just in time for the Great Fire of London.