Time Travelers Never Die

Paul Boehmer's resonant voice and excellent acting add some weight and color to this pedestrian sci-fi yarn, which takes the listener through most of the time-traveling tropes. When Adrian Shelbourne's father, a prominent physicist, develops a time machine and disappears, Adrian and his friend, Dave, set off to find him, launching a prolonged series of time-travel tourism jaunts and tricks to help them escape when things get dangerous. Most of the twists and turns are entirely predictable, and impatience brought on by waiting for the characters to catch up may encourage the listener to perform his or her own time travel on the story by fast-forwarding to the end. A.B.G. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

September 28, 2009
McDevitt (Seeker
) avoids flashy action scenes in this tale of two friends using a time machine to take a grand tour of history. When Adrian “Shel” Shelbourne's physicist father disappears and leaves behind a time-travel device, Shel and his friend Dave Dryden, a language expert, search for Shel's father in Galileo's Italy, Selma during the civil rights marches and other famous times and places. Realizing that time resists paradoxes and history can't be changed, the two friends seize the opportunity to live enriching, truly humane lives from Thermopylae to a few minutes in the future. As the paradoxes begin to pile up and their luck in dodging some of history's villains runs out, McDevitt ingeniously handles a tricky denouement that will leave readers satisfied.