– ‘The Magic of Wor(l)ds’ blog is a hobby, reviews and other bookish stuff on this site are done for free. –
Today I’m on the ‘Running Behind Time’ blogtour, organized by Random Things Tours.
To promote this book I have an excerpt, but before I let you read it first some ‘basic’ information.
About the Author :
Jan Turk Petrie is a writer based in the Cotswolds area of England (UK). She is the author of seven published novels.
The Eldísvík Trilogy – a fast paced future-world Nordic thriller series set in 2068 in a fictional Scandinavian city state. Vol 1 – ‘Until The Ice Cracks’ – published July 2018; Vol 2 – ‘No God for a Warrior’ – published November 2018 & Vol 3 – ‘Within Each Other’s Shadow’ – published April 2019. An ebook boxset of ‘The Eldísvík Trilogy’ is widely available.
Jan has also written 4 very different stand-alone novels.
‘Too Many Heroes’ – a post-war thriller set mainly in the East End of London – published August 2019.
‘Towards the Vanishing Point’ – is a period literary domestic drama published in January 2020. It’s the story of an enduring friendship between two women and the sinister man who marries one of them.
‘The Truth in a Lie’ – is Jan’s first contemporary novel, published in June 2020. A story of love, loyalty, betrayal and the damage done by untold secrets
Jan’s latest novel – ‘Running Behind Time’ – is a time-slip novel published in March 2021. There’s a wrinkle in time on the 15:15 train from Paddington to Cheltenham Spa…
A former English teacher with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Gloucestershire, Jan has also written numerous, prize-winning short stories.
Synopsis :
There’s a wrinkle in time on the 15:15 train from Paddington to Cheltenham Spa
It’s the Summer of 1982, and Beth Sawyer is thrilled to have landed the title role in a play. It may only be in a fringe theatre in Shepherd’s Bush, but it’s the start she’s always dreamed of.
It’s the Summer of 2020, amid the global pandemic, and Tom Brookes is furloughed. Unable to face lockdown in a tiny city flat, he moves back to his mother’s cottage in the sleepy Cotswold village of Stoatsfield-under-Ridge.
Neither of them expects an everyday train journey to throw their normal lives so spectacularly off-course.
This is the story of an extraordinary encounter between two people who should never have met.
Excerpt :
Chapter One
East Sussex, England
July 1982
BethThe sky is darkening with unnatural speed; with it comes a silence she finds disquieting. Ominous. Gulls that had been reeling and squawking off the cliffs have mysteriously disappeared. Only moments ago, the soaring song of larks had accompanied them to the top of the headland; now the birds have all gone to ground.
Other people – perhaps twenty, maybe as many as twenty-five – have been drawn to this same commanding spot as if by enchantment or a shared instinct carried in some ancient race memory. On the way up, she’d caught snatches of excited conversation – a carnival spirit; now there’s only whispering.
It’s almost upon them. A collective hush descends on the small crowd. Faces turn upwards to wait for the spectacle about to take place.
To her left, the silvery streak on the surface of the sea dims and then goes out. Where there had been summer warmth the air is chilly; the fine hairs on her arms stand up in response.
‘This is it,’ Kyle says pulling on her arm until she sits down next to him. The dry grass feels rough against her bare legs. She can smell all the baked-hard sheep poo they’re sitting amongst.
From his rucksack Kyle pulls out his binoculars and the piece of white card he’d rescued from the bin. He’s already explained to her how this will work, how you only need to point one of the lenses at the eclipse and an image will be projected straight through the eyepiece onto the cardboard. The other lens is capped off – it isn’t allowed to watch.
On the train down, he’d read a newspaper while she listened to the Planet Suite on her Walkman – not her usual choice of music but perfect to set the mood. She’d picked up the arts supplement he discarded and read a light-hearted feature describing some of the myths that had grown up as a way of explaining an eclipse. A traditional Norse tale put the blame on wolves eating the sun. In Ancient China it was dragons. Native Americans believed a bear had taken a great bite out of it. The Ancient Greeks took the whole thing more seriously; to them it was a sign the gods were angry and foretold coming disasters and destruction. It doesn’t surprise her; now would be the perfect moment for someone in long robes to stand on top of one of these mounds, raise a wooden staff and spout some dire prophecy.
Kyle is staring down at the image on the card. Seen his way, the coming partial eclipse resembles a diagram in a textbook. He’s set the whole thing up in between them so they can watch together. She notices the small tomato stain in one corner from their takeaway pizza.
In her head she tells him, ‘You might as well be watching it on the telly.’ She’s tempted to say it out loud but that would only spoil the moment for him.
‘Remember, don’t look at it directly.’ This was ostensibly to her, but he’d raised his voice so that it would carry to any foolish person around them who might be about to do such a thing. ‘Just one look and you could go blind,’ he adds for good measure.
The darkness intensifies until it’s impossible to make out the contours of the land or the line where it meets the sky. The colours of the day have all but drained away like they’re in a black and white movie. Under her breath, Beth quotes from King Lear: These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us.
Some people are gazing skywards, wearing special glasses that look far too cheap to ward off the destructive powers of two heavenly bodies set on what, from this angle, appears to be a certain collision.
‘Beth,’ he says, interrupting her train of thought. ‘I think we’re approaching maximum. Look then, or you’ll miss it.’ His sharp elbow digs into her ribs to make his point.
To please him, she glances down at the facsimile he’s created – the scaled down version of this momentous event he appears to be content with. His way is not hers; it never was.
Drawn back to the heavens but not quite trusting herself, she shuts her eyes and lets the moment take her. Such an extraordinary occurrence – it has to signify something.
By the gradual brightening of the shades of red inside her closed lids, she can tell the deepest darkness has passed. How strange this slow process of coming back to herself – to the promise of warmth on her skin. She opens her eyes, to watch the old world being reborn. Monochrome is being overlaid with colour. The spell broken, birds wake and remember their songs. A distant lamb cries out for its mother.
Kyle caps the other lens of the binoculars; roughly folding the piece of card in half, he stuffs both into his rucksack. Standing up, he says, ‘We should head off, beat the crush at the station.’
Now that the everyday world has been restored, the colours seem so bright. Beth wants to linger here, to lie back and find shapes in clouds; follow the progress of the boat that’s just a speck on the horizon as it moves across the newly sparkling sea.
For now, she complies, brushing the grass from her legs before she follows him down the hill towards the point where the narrow path splits and goes off in different directions.
The Magic of Wor(l)ds
Paul Vidich has had a distinguished career in music and media. Most recently, he served as Special Advisor to AOL and was Executive Vice President at the Warner Music Group, in charge of technology and global strategy. He serves on the Board of Directors of Poets & Writers and The New School for Social Research. A founder and publisher of the Storyville App, Vidich is also an award-winning author of short fiction. His novels, An Honorable Man, The Good Assassin and The Coldest Warrior, are available from No Exit Press.
Moscow, 1985. The Soviet Union and its communist regime are in the last stages of decline, but remain opaque to the rest of the world—and still very dangerous. In this ever-shifting landscape, a senior KGB officer—code name GAMBIT—has approached the CIA Moscow Station chief with top secret military weapons intelligence and asked to be exfiltrated. GAMBIT demands that his handler be a former CIA officer, Alex Garin, a former KGB officer who defected to the American side.
Award-winning, best-selling novelist Gianrico Carofiglio was born in Bari in 1961 and worked for many years as a prosecutor specializing in organized crime. He was appointed advisor of the anti-Mafia committee in the Italian parliament in 2007 and served as a senator from 2008 to 2013. Carofiglio is best known for the Guido Guerrieri crime series: Involuntary Witness, A Walk in the Dark, Reasonable Doubts, Temporary Perfections and now, A Fine Line, all published by Bitter Lemon Press. His other novels include The Silence of the Wave. Carofiglio’s books have sold more than four million copies in Italy and have been translated into twenty-four languages worldwide. 
One spring afternoon Lorenza, a former lover of Guerrieri, shows up in his office. Her son Jacopo stands convicted of the first-degree murder of a local drug dealer. For the appeal, Lorenza turns to Guerrieri. But he is not convinced of the innocence of Lorenza’s son, nor does he have fond memories of how their relationship ended two decades earlier. Nevertheless, he accepts the case; perhaps to pay a melancholy homage to the ghosts of his youth. He soon becomes embroiled in a fascinating judicial process tainted by unreliable testimony and hasty and incomplete police work.
Jessica Moxham is a writer with interest in the areas of parenting and disability. Her eldest son, Ben, is severely disabled. She writes a blog at 
Jessica Moxham thought she was prepared for the experience of motherhood. Armed with advice from friends and family, parenting books and antenatal classes, she felt ready.
Sergio Olguín was born in Buenos Aires in 1967 and was a journalist before turning to fiction. Olguín has won a number of awards, among others the Premio Tusquets 2009 for his novel Oscura monótona sangre (“Dark Monotonous Blood“). His books have been translated into German, French and Italian.
Veronica Rosenthal has retreated to a cousin’s remote cottage in the province of Tucuman, to recuperate from the traumatic events in The Fragility of Bodies. She befriends two female tourists – an Italian and a Norwegian — invites them to stay and starts a sexual relationship with one of them. After a party they attend together, Veronica travels on alone but days later discovers that the women have been murdered. Suspicion falls on a local Umbanda priest, but Veronica starts to uncover a web of corruption, abuse and femicide in which government, wealthy landowners and a high-ranking official from the Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ are all implicated. Veronica’s investigation, with its unforeseen political dimensions, has alarmed new enemies who will try to stop her at all cost.
Notionally, I’m a school physics teacher. I’ve worked in a variety of schools in north-east England and started recently as the PGCE Physics tutor at Newcastle Uni. I also write a whole load of textbook materials for schools, my biggest titles being A Level Physics books for Edexcel exam board courses.
Everything anyone sees and hears is recorded and available to view online. Our eyes and ears are remotely wiretapped. There can be no secrets. But… what if the surveillance system had been hacked, and you weren’t actually committing the crimes people saw you committing? Jack Smith and Vicky Truva are on the run, again.
Elizabeth published ‘Killing The Girl’ in April 2019, which has won the ‘Chill With A Book’ Premier Readers Award and Book Of The Month for October 2020. She is now busy working on her second novel, Killing The Shadowman.
A perfect life, a perfect love – and a perfect murder.
I live in London with my teenage son and our black cat Slinky, and have worked in graphic design for over 20 years, bringing to life the words of others. I began writing Alter Ego almost by accident. I emailed Faber Academy on a day when someone had just pulled out of their ‘Start Your Novel In A Week’ course. Without that stroke of luck, I may never have got further than the first few chapters.
Pounding on the door. My seven-year-old son shaking me awake. My head fuzzy with sleeping pills. The hallway flashing with blue light. This morning my life will change forever.
Beth Overmyer has authored several books—In a Pickle, a middle grade novella, and Circus in a Shot Glass, a women’s fiction novel, being among them. She’s in love with the fantasy genre, mysteries—especially when there’s tea and/or a quirky sleuth involved—, and wouldn’t say no to reading and writing in every genre but hardcore horror and erotica. Influencers to her writing include J.R.R. Tolkien and Brandon Sanderson, though Douglas Adams may be lurking in there somewhere. 
Having killed his lifelong enemy, Aidan Ingledark finds himself in possession of a map to the Questing Goblet, one of the Goblets Immortal that gives the drinker luck beyond measure. Meraude seeks this Goblet to wipe out magic-kind. Aidan and his traveling companion are determined to find it first but they must battle through illusion and doubt.
Chas Murrell has been a Police Officer, Senior Fire Commander, Customs Coastwatch surveillance mission co-ordinator, heavy machinery mechanic, emergency medical technician/ instructor, film extra, and General Manager of an event company. He has published academic papers on liquid hydrogen and held a worldwide provisional patent for a nonlinear mathematical calculation. He survived Australia’s largest gas BLEVE in 1987, and has provided operational support to some of Australia’s largest natural disasters in North Queensland.
The greatest scientific invention of modern times…