The Time Hunters and the Spear of Fate

Carl Ashmore's The Time Hunters and the Spear of Fate is a Christmas time-travel adventure for 10 year olds that begins with a toy bus where no toy bus should be.

What happens

It's November 1922 and Howard Carter is chiselling his way into the tomb of Tutankhamun. By candlelight he sees gold everywhere. Then, among the boy king's toys, he finds a little red double-decker bus. In a tomb sealed for over three thousand years!

Meanwhile Becky and Joe are on the train to Bowen Hall for Christmas. Uncle Percy meets them at the station dressed as Father Christmas. His sleigh is pulled by Roger, who's really a giant prehistoric elk with a red football tied to his nose.

Who else would bring a five-million-year-old "reindeer" to the village children's party?

There's a LOT of fun to be had. The time travellers' Christmas party is held more than half a mile under the Indian Ocean. Uncle Percy goes as Nelson (the empty sleeve is the joke), and Joe has a rubber zombie shark costume with an eyeball on a spring. Uncle Percy's third time machine is a bubblegum-pink Cadillac. And the car park is full of everyone else's, from a gondola to a camel to a public toilet (best not use it, you might end up in China).

Becky and Joe are as bickery as ever. Becky tells Joe she's spent ninety quid on his present just to watch him squirm. That kind of sibling wind-up will probably sound very familiar at home!

It isn't all tinsel, though. Will has been missing for days. Then news arrives that two friends from an earlier adventure have been found shot dead, and a third has been taken. It happens off the page, but Becky is in tears, and some readers will feel it too. If your reader is fine with a properly dark turn inside a lot of jokes, they'll be gripped.

The story carries straight on from the books before it, so it really is best read from the beginning with The Time Hunters.

What to read next

If the tomb is the bit they love, The Boy Who Stole the Pharaoh's Lunch is a shorter, funny trip to Ancient Egypt. Seth picks up a golden beetle in class and lands in the Nile, in the days when Tutankhamun was still a tiny prince.