The Midnight Clock
by Jamie Costello
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Pub Date 7 Mar 2024 | Archive Date 6 Mar 2024
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Description
'A marvellously exciting - and thought-provoking - time-travelling murder mystery. Smart, funny, moving, atmospheric - I laughed a lot, cried once, could not stop reading, and now actually believe in time travel' Simon Mason
'This book is equal parts tension, explosive drama, and heart. I loved it' Ben Oliver
Millie has seven days to save Annie Driscoll from a terrible fate.
Millie doesn't know how or why she has been brought into Annie's life.
But she's sure of one thing: Annie has already been dead for 68 years.
Struggling to come to terms with her uprooted life, Millie is living with her father and his new girlfriend in a building which used to house the most famous women's prison in the UK. The only remnants of that place is the old prison clock in the hall - a clock that has long been silent.
When the clock begins to strike again one night, Millie meets a young, terrified woman in a cell. Annie cannot see her, but Millie realises that she may be the key to changing Annie's fate - a fate that was sealed in 1955. But is there enough time for justice to be done?
The Midnight Clock is an immersive, imaginative novel for young adults in which past and present collide.
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780349003924 |
| PRICE | £9.99 (GBP) |
| PAGES | 400 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Tony J, Reviewer
Jamie Costello – The Midnight Clock
Jamie Costello is the YA penname for adult crime writer Laura Wilson whose fascinating teen debut Monochrome (2022) impressed me greatly a couple of years ago. This clever dystopian speculative thriller is set after an undiagnosed phenomenon causes everybody to see in black and white or monochrome, which brings the world to its knees. The Midnight Clock is a fascinating change of direction in which dystopia is abandoned in favour of a strange type of time travel which catapults a teenage girl back to 1955, but she retains the ability to come back to the present day and gets sucked into a complex murder mystery and potential miscarriage of justice which she tries to rectify.
There are many novels on the market featuring ‘Butterfly Effect’ stories where changing something in the past impacts the future, but there are unlikely to be many as strange as The Midnight Clock. Millie is temporarily living with her father and his new (much younger) partner whilst her mother is in Greece and spends her time antagonising them. Her father’s flat is in a converted part of an old prison and in the complex the clock from the prison has been retained and Millie is drawn to it. Initially thinking she has been dreaming or sleepwalking, she finds herself transported back to the prison in 1955, a week before the execution of Annie Driscoll and when she returns to the modern period begins to research into this tragic woman’s life. What follows is an immersive back and forward drama where Millie uses the present to investigate the past in what becomes an incredibly complex mystery. I am not 100% certain I understood all the aspects of the time ripples, but I enjoyed the romantic storyline, the jokes over how the meaning of words change (‘gay’ and many others), the reveals about the clock and the manner in which the past connected with the present. This was a clever character driven drama which kept things low key and avoids the loud dramatics of films like Back to the Future and was all the better for it. AGE RANGE 12+
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