The Memory Collectors by Dete Meserve Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: sad fluff, science fiction, time travel
Pages: 336
Published by Crooked Lane Books on May 20, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Four strangers time travel to the past and find themselves stuck on the day all their lives were changed in this stunning speculative mystery from award-winning film and television producer Dete Meserve, perfect for fans of Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Wrong Place Wrong Time and The Paradox Hotel.
What would you do if you could spend an hour in your past? Four strangers in the beach town of Ventura, California are about to find out.
Elizabeth aches for one more precious hour with her son who died in a senseless accident. Andy is desperate to find his first love who vanished after a whirlwind romance. Logan craves the rush of surfing and mountain climbing, yearning to reclaim the freedom he lost after a misstep landed him in a wheelchair. Brooke is looking for an hour of relief from the guilt of an unforgivable mistake.
Enter Aeon Expeditions, the groundbreaking time travel invention of Mark Saunders—which allows some lucky clients the chance to spend an hour in their past. Even though Aeon’s technology ensures time travel can’t alter the future, all four clients, including Mark’s ex-wife Elizabeth, yearn to revisit the hour that changed their lives forever.
But when their “hour” extends beyond sixty minutes, they find themselves stranded in the past. As their paths intertwine unexpectedly, they unearth shocking secrets hidden in the shadows of their shared All their lives were shattered the same night on a secluded highway by the beach. As they delve into the hidden truths of that pivotal hour, a startling revelation emerges. They were not alone. Someone else was present, harboring deadly intentions.
The Memory Collectors is a heart-wrenching, genre-bending novel brimming with hope, grief and second chances.
My Review:
Anyone who has ever read Before the Coffee Gets Cold will be familiar with the premise of this story. That the opportunity to go back into the past, even for just a few brief minutes, carries more possibilities than the obvious. Even if the obvious seems to be what Aeon Expeditions is providing in The Memory Collectors.
An opportunity to go back in time for one hour. Not to change things, but merely to view the past – your own past – with fresh eyes. In fact, you can’t change the past – no matter how hard you try. All you can change is how you feel about it. And possibly, just possibly, what you do with those new feelings.
Elizabeth, Andy, Brooke and Logan all desperately want to go back to the “Before”, to experience a time when, in retrospect, they were happy. Because they certainly aren’t now. Elizabeth’s son is dead. Andy’s girlfriend is missing. Logan is a paraplegic. And it’s all Brooke’s fault.
They, and their respective fates and fears, are all linked to one single day. With the technology that Aeon Explorations has developed they all have a chance to go back and taste that slice of happiness one more time. A time when Sam was still alive, when Andy still had Kate, when Logan still had a working body. Before Brooke crashed into all of their lives – and then refused to take responsibility for any of her actions.
But the technology glitches, as technology does. Their individual single hours coincide, intermingle, and extend. They collect and collude, vowing to avoid all the circumstances of the accident that maimed them all – one way or another.
But can they change the world they knew? Can they fix the past? Can they STAY? Or will the technology work in the one way they ALL most wish that it would not. Are they already condemned to go through the worst day of their lives again?
Escape Rating B: If you’ve read Before the Coffee Gets Cold and figured out the loophole, then the way that this time travel story plays itself out is going to seem really familiar – and just the teeniest bit obvious. While the mechanism for time travel in The Memory Collectors is much, much more like the technology in The Third Rule of Time Travel by Philip Fracassi than it is the woo-woo magic of that famous coffee shop, the principle is the same. That you can’t change the past no matter how hard you try or even how much time you have. But the self you bring back can return with a whole new attitude to the present – and the future.
This particular story works because we learn things right along with the four time travellers. They each originally believed that they were all alone in their griefs and depressions – and they were all wrong. They all made assumptions about each other’s parts in this story – and those were also totally wrong.
Each was wrapped in their own little bubble, in the past AND in their present, and not a one of them actually knew a damn thing. (As always, ‘assume’ makes an ass out of ‘you and me’.)
So there’s a mystery here, and it’s the one they all unravel together. The mystery of what really happened, and that any of their control of anything was hijacked by events both then and now. And that both a hero and a villain have been waiting in the wings all along.
The story, in the end, is bittersweet, as it should be. Elizabeth’s grief and Logan’s paraplegia can’t be erased with a new attitude. But the friendship this unlikely quartet develops in the past that never was is a balm, and the memories they bring with them ‘back to the future’ DO push all of them onto more hopeful paths than they had any chance of reaching before their shared experience.
It’s the mystery of this one that carried me through the story, as it’s very much The Third Rule of Time Travel thrown into a book blender with Before the Coffee Gets Cold. And that mystery led me down some primrose paths that kept me reading until all the previously open questions found their formerly hidden answers.
If you enjoy time travel stories, but prefer your time travel mechanism on the technical side, you might want to take a look at The Third Rule of Time Travel. If you prefer your time travel to be more mystical/magical – and with a bit more coziness – try Before the Coffee Gets Cold. For more, and similar, time travel stories in general, you might want to take a look at Wrong Place Wrong Time and/or The Paradox Hotel.
But if you like your time travel ‘science’ mixed with a hint of relationship fiction or even ‘sad fluff’, The Memory Collectors will stick in your memory long after you turn the final page.