Introducing Out of Time Novel

A retiring New York Times war correspondent, V.K Truman, is handed one last assignment; to investigate a tip-off about an end-of-times cult who have set up on a mountain outside a small town in Northern California, called Providence. It’s not the sort of story he’d typically pursue, convinced it is a waste of time and virtual click-bait; reluctantly taking the story only when persuaded by his long-time editor-in-chief, Jane Page. 

He’s charged with meeting a local informant, Clancy Roberts, who has lost his wife to the group and claims to have information about their activities that involve breaking up families across the nation. 

Truman is a world-weary straight shooter, and at first sees nothing untoward after meeting the group’s governess, Faith Hope, a well-spoken lady with a strange but alluring gothic appearance, along with the local sheriff - a John Wayne type - who believes the story is baseless, and then dismisses the story out-of-hand when the tipster fails to show up to an appointed meeting.

On his return to New York, he discovers that the Sheriff, J.D Lawler, has attempted to reach him and that an infamously thuggish and aptly named businessman from Las Vegas, Neil Fortune, who is the size of a house, is somehow involved, renewing his interest. Clancy Roberts has gone missing, and the story switches to follow the lead-up to his misadventure and ongoing attempts to convince the sheriff of damning information he’s discovered - including a midnight call from a woman called Sarah claiming to be held captive since she was a child, and that something terrible is going to happen on New Year’s Eve. The sheriff is finally moved to action when Clancy is discovered dead, apparently by suicide, and slowly begins to unravel the threads that led to that moment, which in turn sets him on a trajectory to a showdown with the group’s gigantic lieutenant.

The leader of the group, Alpha, believes he alone understands the nature of reality and is affronted when he learns that a young scientist and entrepreneur, Thomas Egan, claims to have discovered the quantum nature of the human mind. Alpha is an unusually short man with a mysterious background that followers interpret as supernatural, largely because of his blazing purple eyes and an almost magical ability to tranquillize the minds of those around him. His worldview is of a self-aware cosmos fighting against an encroaching darkness that is trying its best to stop him from sharing his revealed truth with the world. When he discovers that Egan’s beautiful wife has enrolled in one of their mediation courses after the still-birth of their child, he uses that knowledge to try and discredit his reputation- and ergo his work, by turning his much-loving wife against him, to fight those dark forces.

The story explores the romance of Egan and his wife who meet by chance in magical circumstances in Italy, both sharing the feeling they were always meant to be together, and then its tragic demise brought about by the surreptitious inculcation of the group and the manipulation of its leader. Yet, an alternative and beautiful reality lingers in the background, as if at some point the whole story is turned upside down, questioning everyone’s realities.

Truman - who rails against growing media fiction - is determined to get to the truth behind the facade and finally discovers that the leader is a Frenchman with a murky past, having entered the U.S on a missing man’s passport two decades earlier and is now married to the younger daughter of a woman who helped him get there. 

The stakes are raised when word gets out about the leader’s imminent arrest, and as a countdown begins towards a so-called ‘New Epoch’, which some interpret as a possible mass suicide, fuelling media speculation and eventual armed intervention.

The Sheriff is compelled to take control of the situation when Truman and a colleague are held captive by the group, as the media descends on the formerly sleepy small town, and the FBI and Homeland tussle for control, shaking him out of decades of inaction and into rescuing the journalist and others who get caught up in the End of Time events.

An exploration of truth and deception, science and belief, human agency and ultimately, our understanding of reality.