The Time Hunters and the Lost City

Carl Ashmore's The Time Hunters and the Lost City is a time-travel thriller for 10 year olds that goes looking for El Dorado, the legendary city of gold.

What happens

It's the fifth Time Hunters book. It opens in 1618, on the morning Sir Walter Raleigh is due to be beheaded. In his cell he tells his wife Bess that he really did find the city of gold, and gives her a sealed letter for a stranger who'll come for it one day.

That stranger's name is Percy Halifax. (Raleigh also asks Bess to keep his head. Yes, really.)

Then it's July, and Becky is on a school trip, sitting by the Thames, bored, because no guided tour can compare with what she's seen time travelling. Her teacher sits down beside her for a chat. It isn't her teacher.

Within minutes the Houses of Parliament are exploding and Emerson Drake has whisked Becky away. He'll show her the truth about her powers, and about the row between her dad and her Uncle Percy, then send her home.

So she goes. Drake takes her to a rainy road near Manchester and a night she can't remember, and at last she understands the nightmare she keeps having about a giant black cat. What she learns about her family is hard, and Drake enjoys every second of it.

Becky is brilliant company. She's furious and frightened and very brave (she very nearly throttles Drake before he talks her round). She's also fed up that her brother Joe has turned so protective he might as well stand guard outside the girls' toilets!

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This one is much darker than a city of gold might suggest. Drake's bombs leave the streets full of people covered in blood. Becky watches a speeding car, its driver drunk and on drugs, hit her six-year-old self. Later she sees a man lying badly beaten in a pool of blood.

Drake also talks coldly about a woman who took her own life, and boasts about a priest his henchman killed. Becky has just turned fourteen and a lot of it feels written for readers her age. It's probably too much for a sensitive child, and especially for one who's been through an accident.

If your reader is older and already gripped by the series, they'll be desperate to know what Becky does next. The story carries straight on from the earlier books, so start with The Time Hunters if you're new.

What to read next

If it's family secrets hidden in the past that hook them, try Time Travelling with a Hamster by Ross Welford. Al finds his dead dad's time machine in a cellar under their old house, with a letter telling him what to do with it.