Highly commended in the Branford Boase Award 2007.
What the judges’ said: ‘an incredibly fertile and convincing picture of the 18th century’
Peter and Kate are whizzed back to the eighteenth century by an anti-gravity machine. Suddenly, they are in the midst of an adventure in the criminal underworld full of highwaymen and thieves who’d help themselves to anything and everything they can – including the anti-gravity machine. Helped by Gideon, a reformed cut-purse, who knows all the tricks of the trade, Peter and Kate survive – and save the machine and return safely to their own world and the frantic search that has been going on for them in the twentieth century. Slipping between two centuries, this is an exciting time-travel adventure.
An encounter with an anti-gravity machine catapults Peter Schock and Kate Dyer back to the 18th century and sets in motion a calamitous chain of events. While a massive police hunt gets underway to find the missing children in the 21st century - in 1763, a hardened criminal, the Tar Man, steals the anti-gravity machine and disappears into the London underworld. Stranded in another time and forced to chase the Tar Man to his lair, Peter and Kate find a friend and guide in reformed cutpurse, Gideon Seymour. Gideon does every thing he can to help them, but will his dark past catch up with him before the machine is recovered?
Linda Buckley-Archer was born in Sussex but spent most of her childhood in rural Staffordshire. She studied French literature and was a college lecturer for several years. She has tried her hand at all sorts of writing but loves writing for children, in particular. She has been commissioned to write articles for The Independent, radio dramas for Radio 4 and, most recently, a television screenplay for BBC 1. She now lives in South West London with her husband and two children.
