About the Book
Professor Yonatan Brand’s death presents an immediate contradiction: a lifeless body found in a sealed room, with no entry point other than the presence of a time machine he engineered after years of calculating risks and paradoxes. When local investigators turn to Benjamin “Bunker” Kronovic, an actor known more for past fame than present success, and Abigail Canaani, a thoughtful librarian who prefers quiet routines, the pair find themselves confronting a mystery with shifting edges.
Their search takes them through Brand’s lifelong connections—a circle of childhood friends who share history, grievances, and secrets they’d rather keep buried. Each revelation complicates their understanding of the timeline, pushing them to consider that the machine may have altered how the crime should be interpreted. The deeper they go, the more they’re forced to ask whether the events unfolded in a straight line at all.
About the Author
Yoav Blum is an author known for blending high-concept speculative ideas with gripping mystery, thriller, and philosophical depth. His work explores extraordinary situations—time travel, body switching, orchestrated coincidences—while grounding them in questions of identity, perception, fate, and free will. Beneath each thriller or puzzle lies a reflection on what it means to be human. His tone is introspective, suspenseful, and often playfully self-aware. Learn more at his website, or connect via Facebook, Instagram, or X.
Excerpt
The gateway opened high in the sky. Minor miscalculations had added up to a farther-than-expected distance from the ground, but it didn’t really matter.
There was green grass down there, gleaming with morning dew, and the trees cast a dark shade. Still, it felt undeniably alien. There was no one there to remember the grass, the trees, or the wild animals roaming about indifferently.
Many years later, when humans discover fossils strewn around and try to find out who had ruled Earth before them, they will make some guesses about how the ancient fauna looked, what color the hide was, and how the skin felt. They may even be able to draw some conclusions regarding the animals’ characters, judging by their height, the shape of their legs, or the size of their teeth. But fossils require certain environmental conditions in order to be formed, and while some habitats had allowed for their dwellers to be remembered, others—those where the type of soil or level of humidity ruled out fossils —had sentenced their critter inhabitants to something worse than extinction or oblivion. No one will ever find any remnants of the animals that existed there; no one will even imagine them.
The human who dropped out of the sky and landed with a heavy thump amid the tall grass would have probably screamed had he seen the face of the animal approaching to sniff him and then take a bite.
It would have been a wild scream of horror, because the thing that approached him was not the partly recognizable figure of a velociraptor or a T-Rex. It did not look like anything that had ever existed in his thoughts. The way it moved, its stinking breath, the idle flutter of what would be called—in the lack of other options—eyes, the circular motion of its fangs boring into the flesh—all of these would have paralyzed any human being with fear bordering on existential sickness; with the realization that he, too, was lost and that he, too, was closer to a beginning-less nonexistence than to an existence that ended in oblivion.
But luckily, the human was already dead.
He was already dead upon exiting the opening high in the sky, and he remained dead throughout the five long seconds of falling down.
The gateway had closed before his body even touched the ground. The animal that had been sniffing the body and nibbling at it walked away, almost bored. The flavor in its mouth felt alien, as if it had tasted something rotten.
Time will pass and eat into the corpse instead of the disinterested creature, deconstructing it in a way no animal, monster, or idea could. The dead human’s molecules will join the anonymous multitude of particles encircling the world and vanish, leaving no trace behind. Like a tree that had fallen in the thick of a forest with no one to hear it fall or cross its path, such was this corpse—it had never actually existed.
