In 2005, Elisa, Víctor and a man named Ric Valente Sharpe were all students under the genius-level professor David Blanes. As the two smartest students, Elisa and Ric were tapped by Blanes to take part in a top-secret project, funded by a mysterious organization called the Eagle Group. After being legally bound to secrecy, all the members of the project found themselves on the tiny island of New Nelson in the Indian Ocean. There they learned that they would be participating in a project to develop a time viewer—Project Zig Zag, so named for the convoluted paths of the physical particles involved.

Blanes had discovered that every photon contained a history of its entire existence. By tapping into this history, visuals of the past could be obtained—at first fuzzy, then, with tinkering, sharp as life. It was a discovery that promised to revolutionize human existence.

But then, after several uncanny events, the project ended in several bloody, inhuman murders. For the past 10 years, the participants have lived with the psychic fallout, although any physical threats seemed at an end. But now, with the new murder of one of them, the monster they unleashed with their inventions seems poised to strike once more.

Elisa, with Víctor's help, must try to close the hole they've opened into the past before the forces from yesterday kill them all.

A solid but stolid novel of suspense

In the year 2000, Arthur Clarke and Stephen Baxter produced a fine novel titled The Light of Other Days, employing the trope of a time viewer that effectively destroyed all secrecy and privacy. (They were preceded in more compact form by Damon Knight, with his excellent "I See You" from 1976.) Their invention was rigorously established in the early parts of the novel, after which meticulous extrapolations as to its widespread fallout were dramatized in the bulk of the book. That's the SF methodology.

Somoza is coming from a different place entirely. While his science is fairly respectable and deftly employed, it's only there to set up mortal danger for the protagonists, in the manner of any slasher film. The time viewer is essentially a MacGuffin for all the hugger-mugger threatening Elisa and her peers.

I'd grudgingly accept this as being simply the dominant mode of the thriller, and not seek to make the book into something it's not. But even as a thriller writer, Somoza fails to enchant. His prose—translated by Lisa Dillman in supposedly accurate fashion—is pedestrian and old-fashioned. A big tough guy is built like "a house." Elisa has "the face and body of a model." And so forth. He's continually warning the reader of shocks to come with verbal pokes in the ribs, and lecturing us in a kind of Victorian voice on how the mind works: "Like so many things we yearn for (or fear), the arrival of a long-awaited (or feared) event began a new stage for her, a new way of thinking."

While the characters are generally believable, Ric Valente Sharpe comes off like a combination of schizo genius Brad Pitt in 12 Monkeys (1995) and Humphrey Bogart (he's always calling Elisa "sweetheart"). He's Doctor Doom to Elisa's Reed Richards.

By the time the author hits the reset button in the climax, we're aware that even those who can see the past are doomed to repeat earlier novels, but in xerox-of-a-xerox manner.