Review by Karl Verhoven

American pilot Dunk Ainsworth and French mathematical coder Lucie Delosnier have been thrown back through time to France in 1917, fortunately for them in the region of the Delosnier family estate. As seen in The Time of the Pioneers, Lucie is masquerading as her ancestor Armance, passing Dunk off as her driver. He’s signed up as a pilot under the alias Duncan Miller, joining an American squadron in France during World War I, but there are already suspicions about him, which may hamper his efforts to modify a biplane into something capable of returning them to the 21^st century.

Co-writers Olivier Jolivet and Frédéric Zumbiehl keep the tensions high, although occasionally artificially maintained. With Miller a definitively anonymous alias during wartime in a different country, indeed a different century, it doesn’t ring true that Armance’s military officer cousin Charles is so obsessed with the idea that he could be a spy. Charles makes for a viable threat, though, as his instincts are actually sound about something not being right, and when confronted about cruelty by his younger brother his cutting response is “That’s because I am fighting the war while others are playing with cars”. Other aspects are more ingenious, Lucie extends the life of her laptop battery when there are no sockets for chargers by having a maid using a rigged cycle to generate energy.

Dunk’s flying skills enable his immediate hero status over the French battlefield, even surviving an encounter with the notorious Red Baron. For all the window dressing of time travel there’s sometimes the feeling the plot was conceived to showcase the skilled Patrice Buendia illustrating aerial combat, where he excels over several scenes. As before, period detail is convincing and the characters have personality.

Jolivet and Zumbiehl throw one obstacle after another in the way of Dunk and Lucie finding their way back to the 21^st century, and Charles apart it’s all naturally phased in. They’re at the best in a tense scene just before the final pages, where they drop a great, but logically considered spanner in the works. As the creators seem to be working in two volume arcs and the fourth Wings of Time book has yet to be issued in France, we’ll be waiting some time for the continuation.