Booklog 68/2025: Jodi Taylor: Out of Time – Time Police #6

[jacey]

Barely recovered from their last adventure (on the train) Team 236 (Team Weird - Luke, Jane and Matthew) are tentatively back in business (though still under supervision), but things aren't going well for the Time Police in general. Construction work reveals (or rather re-reveals) a huge cover-up from that last days of the time war, before Commander Hay became the TP boss, but it's something she'll have to deal with one way or another. A dinosaur shows up in Wales, which causes Hay to request the assistance of Maxwell from St Mary's. No one is quite sure which is going to be the biggest problem, Max or the dinosaur. In Ancient Rome, a St Mary's mission is trying to find out what happened to the city's founder, Romulus, when TP officer Varma turns up and kidnaps him. There's a gnarly knot in the time map which Matthew spots, but can he unravel it? And then everything goes tits-up when a time pod AI starts screaming murder. When long-time antagonist Henry Plympton reappears with a scheme to kidnap and murder the Princes in the Tower, things can't get much worse for the beleaguered Time Police. This book does feature Luke, Jane and Matthew, but also hefty chunks of Commander Hay and her long-suffering adjutant, Charlie Farrenden, Lt. Grint and his usual team, plus the aforementioned Varma and assorted characters we've met before. This book was published on 9th and by 10th October I'd galloped through it. A new Jodi Taylor is always a drop-everything-and-grab-it moment. Glad I did. The only thing missing was Markham... or was he?