Review | SPLINTER EFFECT Digs In with Spirit

Splinter Effect
Written by Andrew Ludington
Published by Minotaur Books
March 18, 2025
Hardcover, 320 pgs.

The very short, shorter-than-Reader’s Digest version of this: Indiana Jones as a time traveler.

Andrew Ludington delivers a combination that in retrospect is a no-brainer, and may have been done before, but this one knocks it out of the park: archeology and time travel. The concept of “chrono archeologists” is deceptively simple: people trained in history travel back in time to recover ancient artifacts just moments before they’re lost to history. Think Indiana Jones grabbing the Ark of the Covenant at Tanis, and you’re close.

Using technology that exists without technobabble explanations, Ward and his ilk jump back to a fixed location and they have a set amount of time to make it back to the “decay point” to get back to the present. Nothing from the past can go forward in the jump, so artifacts have to be buried so that they can be retrieved when the chrono archeologist returns.

Dr. Robert “Rabbit” Ward is our protagonist, a chrono archeologist working for the Smithsonian. He and others like him are sponsored by various organizations or private donors to mount expeditions to various events in the past, and there are times when Ward finds himself in competition with others for the same artifact. And sometimes things go horribly, horribly wrong — which happened twenty years ago when Ward lost a Jewish artifact — the menorah of Jerusalem’s Second Temple — as well as his mentee, Aaron, in Rome 455 CE.

Legally restricted from going back and trying again, Ward has spent the last twenty years agonizing over that disaster. Now Ward has another chance to recover the menorah, as new evidence suggests that it turns up in Constantinople 535 CE. And while he has a chance at some payback, he has to assemble the funds for the trip himself, and that involves re-opening some old wounds. Nevertheless, Ward’s able to put together what he needs to make the trip, and he’s determined to succeed this time.

Naturally, things get complicated.

This time, Ward has competition from a mysterious woman who’s plagued him before on other expeditions, returning to the present only to steal an artifact from him before he can retrieve it himself. Add to that the fact that the Jewish population of Constantinople is on the verge of violent revolution (when historically, they shouldn’t be…) and the locals seem to know Ward doesn’t belong, and the complications start to pile up pretty quickly, threatening Ward’s mission to retrieve the menorah and make it to his decay point or else be stuck in the past forever.

This is Andrew Ludington’s first novel, but you wouldn’t know it. His plot is tight at just the right pace to keep the reader interested and turning the pages to see how things continue to escalate and complicate Rabbit’s mission in Constantinople.

But I want to start first with his version of time travel. The mechanics of it are glossed over. Ward gets in the machine, and then he’s in the past. Ludington mentions the technology, but doesn’t get bogged down in the details with pages of exposition about the physics of it. There’s just enough detail to put the process into the story. It’s just taken for granted that time travel exists and it works and the people involved know how to do it and you don’t need all the details in the universe to accept it. The narrative is compelling enough that you get full immersion almost from the first page.

I also like this “decay point” concept, where the time traveler has to return to his arrival point by a certain time to be pulled back to the present. Miss it, and you’re stranded. It adds another layer to the stakes without a lot of extra exposition along the way.

The economy of words helps also to keep the pace of the story consistent. Ludington has details in his descriptions when he needs them, but he’s not so much in love with his own writing that he lingers on every single descriptive term available in the dictionary. And the amount of detail on the page allows me to believe that Ludington’s done his homework when it comes to ancient Greek lore, what Constantinople (not Istanbul) would have been like in the year 535. It’s just enough for me to get a clear picture of what it could have been like to be there, and not too much that it knocks me out of following Rabbit through the adventure as things get worse for him while time is running out for him to succeed.

And while the press material invokes Outland for comparisons, there’s not a lot of romantic elements here. Yes, there’s the mysterious “Helen” who reluctantly partners with Rabbit purely out of self-preservation, but Ludington rightly avoids a deep dive into the “enemies to lovers” cliché, instead giving the relationship — adversarial at first — time to breathe and follow a natural course determined by circumstances and not the Hand Of The Writer. So when we get to the end of the book, we’re further along, but they’re not falling all over each other as they whisper sweet nothings.

This book fits right in with adventure stories like Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Librarian, and I could see a studio picking it up for adaptation. Rabbit is cut from the same cloth as your typical heroic adventure figure, and he has flaws enough to offset the fantastical nature of his work. He’s not the dashing hero, nor is he a clone of Han Solo, Indiana Jones, or Frank Buck. And that’s refreshing in this age of so many copycats mining the copycats mining the copycats of that thing we all grew up watching.

Definitely recommending this one and the sequel that comes out next year.