I'm gradually coming to the realisation that Crooked Lane likes genrehoppers. And that's no bad thing. I love genrehoppers and have dedicated sets to them at my film festival. However, it does mean that what these books seem to be isn't necessarily what they are. This one certainly looks like a science fiction novel but the ARC labels it a mystery, which seems more appropriate. Yet I think it succeeds best as a romance, as long as you're someone who believes in ideas like love at first sight and that certain things are meant to be. That's crucial to buy into one of the threads and, without it, this intricate house of cards falls apart.

The setup is time travel, but the four people who we follow through time, courtesy of the time machine at Aeon Expeditions, are unusual for a bunch of reasons, which begins the mystery.

For one, none of them should have qualified for the trip. Elizabeth Saunders has done it before and it's supposed to be a one-time thing, but then she's also the ex-wife of Mark Saunders, the owner of Aeon Expeditions, so we can see why she's been given a second shot. Andy Schapiro is a stalker, or least he feels like one; he's coughing up crazy money to spend one more hour with a girl he knew for less than a week and he hasn't been able to track down since. Logan Sandoval can't meet the physical requirements, being paralysed, even if we sympathise with his wish to experience walking again. And Brooke Dalton is a convicted felon, which rules her right out. It's there in the terms and conditions.

Dete Meserve introduces us to each of them and something of their background either before or immediately after their trips back in time. Elizabeth arrives at a family reunion twenty-two years earlier in Santa Barbara. Andy finds himself at Café Fiore in Ventura on 20th August, 2025, the summer he met Kate Montano. Logan shows up at the base of Mount Whitney with working legs ready to climb the mountain. And Brooke appears at a party in her living room on Hillcrest Drive. None of that seems inappropriate.

Except, reason two: while Dete Meserve is careful to vary the details she chooses to share, we gradually come to realise all four of them went back to the very same time and their locations are pretty close to each other, too. In fact, we can see some of the actual connections, which we build as we go to merge these stories into one that starts with Sam Saunders, son of Mark and Elizabeth, who was run over and killed on 25th August, 2025 by a presumed drunk driver on the Pacific Coast Highway. Obviously, that's where Elizabeth comes in; she's the grieving mother in this story. However, the other three all played their part in that accident too.

I thought about whether to explain how, because that's not really the mystery in play here and those roles are explained relatively soon in the story. I chose not to because the whole book is a set of layers, each one not just deepening our understanding of that tragic night but reframing it in a new light. Therefore, our initial read on it is the first layer to be revealed and, while it's a fair and accurate story, it isn't the whole picture and neither are any of the further layers until the final twists happen and we realise what that big picture truly looks like. In other words, it's fair for you to reveal each of those layers yourself by reading the book.

What I will explain is that the business model that Aeon Expeditions has is to send people back in time for an hour. That's all. They cough up tens of thousands of dollars and they get just sixty minutes from their past to relive. After that hour is up, they're brought back into their present, which we now realise is our future, the year 2047, where nothing has changed because the rules of time travel, as explained by "a whole row of quantum physicists headed by Dr. Fabio Costa at the University of Queensland", means that they can't change anything.

So, most obviously, Elizabeth can't do something different to prevent her son from being killed. Similarly, Andy can't stop Kate from vanishing from his life, Logan can't avoid losing the use of his legs and Brooke can't escape going to jail for vehicular manslaughter. They can't even bring anything back with them, even by hiding it somewhere to retrieve in the future, which was the entire rationale behind Andrew Ludington's 'The Splinter Effect', which I reviewed a couple of months ago. Whatever happens in the past Aeon Enterprises makes temporarily available will stay there after people return to their unchanged present.

Well, kinda sorta, because, while Meserve locks down this time travel logic pretty tight, there's a loophole and that's knowledge. Sure, the past stays the past and nothing physical can return to the present with them, but the people who return aren't exactly the same people who went back, because they have the knowledge of what happened in that hour. And the key to this book is that these four, for reasons we and they don't understand until the end, aren't brought back after sixty minutes. They seem to be stuck in the past and that means that they have the clear opportunity to learn a heck of a lot more, just as we do reading about them.

This works as a time travel story, but the time travel aspect is really just a MacGuffin. It's what makes everything else possible, so it's there, but this story and where it goes wouldn't be any different if it was removed entirely and replaced by a wizard in a star-spangled robe touching them all on the shoulder with his magic wand or aliens arriving on our planet and zapping four people with a super ray. None of it matters except that it enables all four of these people to go back in time to a particularly crucial moment and get stuck there for a while.

It also works as a mystery, as long as you like your mysteries wrapped up neatly in a ball without a single stray thread. Meserve didn't write a novel so much as she crafted a puzzle box, with all the moves, which must happen in a very specific order, laid out in advance to open it and expose its contents. Some might find this overly convenient, but I'm guessing that's more likely during a second visit than a first. On the first, we're too busy trying to figure out how everything has to be connected and then trying to figure out the next layer before Meserve shows it to us.

Most of all, it works as a romance, but, as I mentioned above, it rather hinges on our opinion of Andy Schapiro. Back in 2025, he met Kate Montano at a party and they hit it off magnificently. Everything seemed to be magical. He fell in love with her. She fell in love with him. A beautiful future was assured. And then it didn't happen, because she vanished, possibly deliberately. The entire relationship spanned less than a week but Andy can't forget it. He feels deep down that it was meant to be and that they aren't together is some sort of cosmic mistake, so he's spent twenty-two years trying and failing to find her, rather than moving on with his life.

There are those who will look at that and see him as a true romantic. It's a Great Romance with capital letters and they'll yearn for some magical path in which Andy and Kate end up together. However, there are those who will look at that and see him as a creepy stalker. Kate must have realised what he was and got the heck out of Dodge before he could take over her life and make it really weird. Those people won't appreciate him going back to see her again and will root not for the happy couple but for Kate's safety.

This will work as a romance for the first group, because this isn't just about Andy and Kate, it's about four different romantic relationships and the other three hinge on this one. The second group won't see it as a romance at all and they're going to have so many problems with it that everything else that happens will be tainted by it. While that seems acutely polarising, I should point out that I'm kind of in both camps but I'm leaning strongly towards the first. I guess that means that I'm a romantic, because I buy into Kate being the love of Andy's life and, while what he's done certainly seems excessive and extreme, none of it is actually problematic. He's never hurt anyone and I'm not going to assume that he would until he does.

And that all got deep and meaningful, but as a puzzle of a novel, I feel that's appropriate. What I've said may turn you off 'The Memory Collectors' and that's fine, but it may point you towards it too and that's fine as well. ~~ Hal C F Astell