Grade A #BookReview: Double Shadow by Andrew Ludington

Double Shadow (Splinter Effect, #2) by Andrew Ludington
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: action adventure, mystery, science fiction, thriller, time travel
Series: Splinter Effect #2
Pages: 288
Published by Minotaur Books on April 21, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In this thrilling installment of the Splinter Effect series, time-traveling archaeologist Rabbit Ward returns to the past to help save his former adversary and track down a murderous thief in first century Jerusalem.

ROME, 2019. Time-traveling, Smithsonian archaeologist Rabbit Ward is back in the present, but not for long. Helen, his former adversary and growing ally, is in trouble with the law after being framed for a murder she didn’t commit. Stuck in hiding and running out of other options, she turns to Rabbit for help. "Help" in this case involves a trip to first century Jerusalem to track down a mysterious man named Einar Eshek.

But Rabbit won't have to do this mission alone; as soon as he arrives in 68 CE, he meets a younger version of Helen, one who has never met him before. Together, they work to track down Eshek, who turns out to be not only a time-traveling thief, but a murderous psychopath.

As they pursue Eshek through time, Rabbit and Helen feel something even bigger pulling them together. Torn between the two versions of the woman he knows, and with the clock ticking down on Helen’s fate in 2019, Rabbit might have no choice but to betray her past self to secure Helen’s safety in the future. Tensions rise as Jerusalem prepares to go to war with Rome, and Rabbit races to capture Eshek, clear Helen’s name, and make it back to 2019 in one piece—a feat that’s proving to be easier said than done—before everything falls apart.

My Review:

Archaeologists dig up formerly hidden caches of important artifacts all the time. As often as Egypt’s Valley of the Kings has been explored and looted over the millennia, the last undiscovered royal tomb of the 18th Egyptian dynasty (the dynasty that included Tutankhamun), wasn’t discovered until February, 2025. It’s not that historians and archaeologists didn’t know that Thutmose II existed, or that he must have a tomb someplace, they just couldn’t locate it.

Until they did.

But if time travel were an actual thing, as it is in this Splinter Effect series, such discoveries might not be so uncommon. After all, that’s what Dr. Robert “Rabbit” Ward is famous for – and what his expeditions get funded for. He doesn’t just dig up the past in the present – he goes back to the past and steals or saves (opinions vary) important artifacts and places them EXACTLY where he knows he can find them again in the present.

For Rabbit, it’s about being able to experience history by being there. The artifacts he “finds” are just an excuse to get funding. He’s in it for the adventure – and the thrill of it all.

But just as billionaires pay their way into space travel, in a world in which time travel is a viable technological thing there would be some who would pay their way into the past. Even if the practice was illegal. Which it needs to be because, well, imagine the mess if anyone with enough money could go back in time and manipulate the present?

(It’s been imagined, that’s the story in Nicholas Binge’s Extremity. It’s not a pretty picture. AT ALL)

In this version of time travel, similar to John Scalzi’s 3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years, the time traveler can’t change their own timeline, but they can ‘splinter’ the timeline to create a different future for a different version of themselves and their world.

They can also go back in time to, let’s say, act out their worst impulses with the certainty that it won’t have any effect on their own present. (A variation of Jack the Ripper’s time travel in the movie Time After Time.)

In this second book in this series, however, Rabbit’s motives for this particular jaunt back to the waning days of the Second Temple period of Jewish history (68 CE), isn’t about an artifact or even a treasure – not that he isn’t using one as an excuse.

He’s going back in time to chase a serial killer and help a frenemy – not expecting the two things to turn out to be the same thing after all.

Escape Rating A: I did read the first book in this series, Splinter Effect, for a Library Journal review but didn’t write it up because OMG Rabbit’s story in that first one is a fascinating but confusing mess. (I definitely enjoyed it, I just couldn’t wrap my mind around a review of the length I use here. I either had too many words or not nearly enough.)

This second book is even more fascinating, because there’s a bit more of a through line to tie the past, present, present past (that makes sense in the story, I swear), and the unknown future together into a rollicking historical adventure.

It helps a lot that Rabbit finally figures out his weird relationship with frenemy/rival time traveler (Dr.) Helen Fletcher. I didn’t catch the hints the first time around, because it’s sorta/kinda the relationship in The Time Traveler’s Wife – and I haven’t read that. Also, that impression isn’t strictly correct although it is adjacent.

In other words, the relationship between Rabbit and Helen isn’t as much like The Time Traveler’s Wife as it IS like a different SFnal relationship that was based on that book. By that, I’m referring to the relationship between the Doctor and River Song in Doctor Who (“The Silence in the Library” – and I can’t believe I’m referring to that twice in the same week) in that they’ve met out of order. Rabbit’s first meeting with Helen was in Splinter Effect. Her first meeting with him is here in Double Shadow, back in 68 CE in Qumran. Judaea is about to fall to the Romans, and Rabbit and Helen are caught up in the turmoil that leads to the destruction of the Second Temple and the fall of Jerusalem.

Which leads straight into the other fascinating thing about time travel stories. The “you are there” effect. The reason Rabbit does what he does, the reason Helen got caught up by the same compulsion, the thing that makes this series compulsively readable, is that they are us. They’re people from our time who are able to go back and experience history as it happened who can see things through our eyes.

Including the desire to make things better with the acknowledgement that they can’t. That for them, this is settled history. They can’t save anyone because they are already dead. And they have to do their damndest to experience the world as it was and stand by and bear witness to history even when it’s awful and not lose their humanity in the process.

So we feel for them and with them even as we watch with fascination as history unfolds – very much warts and blood and guts and all. That they’ve brought the excesses of our present into the excesses of the past – which goes back to Time After Time AGAIN – added a touch of mystery to a story that was already riveting – AND opens the series up to further (mis)adventures in its future. And I’m looking forward to reading them!

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