Timebound (originally self-published under the title ‘Time’s Twisted Arrow’) is the first book from ‘The Chronos Files’ trilogy of novels written by American author Rysa Walker (this is a pen name).

After time travel was discovered in the mid-22nd century by a team of researchers funded by the U.S. government, the Chrono-Historical Research and Natural Observation Society (CHRONOS), a society of historical researchers, was tasked with the challenge of creating a code of ethics for time travellers, and introducing effective safeguards against any sort of timeline manipulation.

The solution was the genetic modification of historical researchers’ genome. Time travel would thus be restricted to a small number of responsible professionals, highly trained historians with this particular genetic encoding, who would travel to a specific point in the past and return directly to their original timeline, with the minimal impact on the visited time period.

Kate Pierce-Keller, a sixteen-year-old teenager, is one of these genetically altered individuals (or rather, she inherited her unique genetic make-up), however, she is completely unaware of her special ‘gift’.

Unaware that is, until her grandmother gives her a strange blue medallion adorned with the symbol of an hourglass (only she can see) and speaks of time travel. Kate initially assumes that the old woman’s mental faculties became compromised with senile dementia. But soon it all becomes horrifyingly real when a murder in Kate’s past destroys the very foundations of her present-day life. Suddenly, that mysterious medallion is the only thing protecting Kate from literally blinking out of existence.

Kate learns that the killing at the Chicago World’s Fair is a part of something much more large, much more profound and much more sinister, and that her genetic ability to time travel makes her the only one who can fix the future. Risking everything, Kate travels back in time to the year 1893 to try and prevent the murder that sets in motion the whole chain of events that follows.

Changing the timeline comes with a personal cost however – if Kate succeeds, the boy she loves will no longer have any recollection of her existence. And, regardless of her motives, does Kate actually have the moral right to manipulate the fate of the entire human race?

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Rysa Walker’s Timebound holds some potentially interesting premise, but a dull main protagonist with her lukewarm romance, as well as shaky storytelling clumsily interrupted by frequent info-dumps, drag the novel down, resulting in a somewhat underwhelming reading experience.

The author since published also Time’s Edge, the second novel in The Chronos Files series, which follows Kate’s quest to save the Earth from the Cyrist conquest, and wrote two more novellas expanding The Chronos Files universe: Time’s Echo and Time’s Mirror (all published by Skyscape, a young adult imprint of Amazon Children’s Publishing). The third and last book of the series, The Chronos Files #3 – Time’s Divide is set to be published in October 2015.

TRIVIA: Chicago World’s Fair formed the setting for the real-life killing spree of the first documented American serial killer Herman Webster Mudgett, a.k.a. Dr. Henry Howard Holmes.