Dead Reckoning

Seventeen-year-old Caspian Vael is a cryptographer who trusts patterns more than people, until he hacks into a restricted server and watches a forty-second clip of his own execution in 1914 Sarajevo. The Meridian Bureau, a clandestine temporal agency, recruits him under the guise of protection, but Caspian’s analytical mind uncovers a chilling truth: the kill order on his life didn’t come from their enemies. It came from within the Bureau itself, routed through a shadowy faction called the Compact that believes prolonging World War I will prevent something worse in 1923. Every jump through time to gather proof erodes his memories, his relationships, and the fragile threads of a life where his mother still survives. The deeper he digs, the more the math of his choices unravels, because in a game where timelines are currency, the cost of winning might be everything he’s trying to save.

Caspian’s dry precision and ruthless logic make him the perfect operative, or the perfect pawn. As he decodes the Bureau’s lies, he’s forced to question whether his own talent for pattern recognition is a weapon or a weakness. The Compact’s operatives, like the enigmatic Ida Vros, complicate his mission further, offering alliances that blur the line between enemy and ally. With each jump, the stakes escalate: a single misstep could erase his mother’s survival, fracture the Bureau’s grip on history, or hand the Compact the catastrophe they claim to fear. Caspian doesn’t believe in fate, but the Bureau’s calculations are starting to feel inevitable, and the only way out might be to burn the equation down.

Dead Reckoning is a cerebral, high-stakes thriller for readers who crave time travel with consequences, not adventure. Taut prose and razor-sharp tension weave a story where every choice fractures the timeline, and the real enemy might be the system that promised to protect him. If you love morally complex protagonists, intricate puzzles, and spy fiction that feels like a knife’s edge, this is your next obsession.