When an adventurer is trapped in the distant past, the only person who can save him is his own granddaughter. The problem? She hasn’t been born yet.

When John Hamman found the time machine, he didn’t know what adventures it would lead him on, and he could not predict the sequence of events that would strand him in the distant past. Can he shape a future that will one day save him from his own mistakes?

Jenny Hamman was a child when her grandfather showed her the dinosaur tooth he wore on a cord around his neck. That moment set the trajectory of her life. Jenny had no idea of the dangers she would one day face. Only she can save her grandfather. Her existence and that of everyone she loves hangs in the balance.

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Sneak Peak:

Jenny wasn’t sure what woke her, some instinct that death was near. Perhaps it breathed on her. Jenny opened her eyes but only saw darkness. The smell made her freeze. It was a fetid smell of rotten meat, the smell of a lion or hyena that fed on carrion.

She had covered herself with cut ferns, but she could turn her head slightly and look up where she saw patches of the stars through the trees on this moonless night. Then a shape moved above her and blotted out the stars. She heard a huffing sound, and that fetid breath blew down on her like a wind.

She drew her gun and fired up into the shadow looming above her. The flash from the muzzle of the High Power lit up the inside of its mouth like a flashbulb, as she fired the gun down its throat. All she saw was teeth.

Jenny screamed, the sound lost as she pulled the trigger over and over, emptying the magazine of the gun as fast as she could. She pulled her arm back as the jaws snapped shut. In the flashes she saw a great head pull back. She kept firing, and then the slide locked back on the empty magazine.

She was engulfed in a darkness more complete than she had ever known, her night vision ruined. That void was filled with a roar. It was more than a sound. It surrounded her and shook her very core.

Blindly, she grabbed for the spear that laid beside her as she slept, and crawled away through the ferns that covered the ground. Through the ringing in her ears, she heard a crashing behind her as the great head smashed through the brush where she had been, its jaws closing on her resting place. Jenny made it to her feet and took off running.

She might have been safe if it hadn’t been for the tree. She hit it straight on at full speed, and all she remembered was pain. Laying on her back, she had her spear and the empty gun was still in her hand. She felt it in the ground. It shook beneath her. The dinosaur was coming.

One of the most enjoyable parts of writing this book was finding ways to weave it into the history of the period. I didn't see that coming. I didn't think I would enjoy the process so much. My friend Tom was a history major and guided me through this suggesting some of the events. I'm proud that you should be able to look up and find all of the characters places and events that the main characters encounter in the book. I encourage you to do so as their true stories are far more fascinating then anything I could spin. It pained me that sometimes I could only include a sentence or drop a name when they deserved so much more. Even as it is my editor was pressing me to cut out many of these section as not critical to the main story. Still I think I've left you dozens of little rabbit holes to explore.
Something else that became far more interesting then I expected was the paleontology in the book. It turns out that new discoveries are being made every day. Because the characters are separated by decades it gave an opportunity to examine how our understanding of dinosaurs has changed over the years. From John from the 1920's to his granddaughter from 2002, and finally the professor from our time. John expects them to be lizards but is confused when he finds many of them are more like birds. Jenny is kind of post revolution when ideas like warm bloodedness and feathers were on the table for discussion but she has missed out on the last twenty years of research that confirmed much of this. The professor is a smaller character but I was able to include a few ideas like tracking migration patterns through gastroliths, stomach stones. I found that in a recent paper.
On a final note, all the guns, and calibers are real and period appropriate. Some of them are even featured in my "Reference Library", you might call a closet. I do not own a Tankgewehr or a Neostead. Wish I did but those were solutions that I had to look up that would be appropriate for the period.
I hope you enjoy the book as much as I enjoyed writing it.