On my third day in 1992, I saw Laura Dietrichson.

It was one thing to read about murders in true crime books. The victim had a life-accounts and photos were merely evidence of that life. But that’s all it was. The person was still dead as you read about them.

Yet here I was looking at a future murder victim, as real, as alive, and as wholly unaware of the date she would die as I was of my own. Her murder in ten months somehow made her seem even more alive.

Professor Cal Sutherland’s research on the philosophy of time and time travel elicits only snide remarks from fellow philosophers and rejection notices from journals. Even Cal would admit that time travelers probably aren’t real-until he encounters one, Dr. Lionel Bradshaw, inside his neighbor’s burning house.

Cal accompanies Lionel on a trip back in time to retrieve a rare set of tumblers, and Cal happily lives out what had formerly been a mere thought experiment. But when a 23 year-old murder threatens the secrecy of the time machine in the present day, the only one who can help is the murdered woman herself-still very much alive somewhere in the past. It’s up to Cal to track her down and learn all he can about her death, before it happens.

Cal soon learns that, while the past cannot be changed-the First Law of time travel-there is much a time traveler can do in the past. Unfortunately for Cal, this includes the possibility of dying there…