4.5★s
The Observer Effect is the third book in the Joseph Bridgeman series by British author, Nick Jones. Two months after a successful mission back to the 1960s, Joe is getting viewings that feature Scarlett, the woman who locked an inexperienced time traveller like him into that vital mission. Now, she’s in sixteenth Century Macau, telling another time traveller that she can give him another chance to redeem his failed mission. And interfering with the very special pocket watch on which all time travellers rely.

That’s not the only thing disturbing Joe’s equilibrium: his sister Amy seems to be upset, and not just about their father’s blatant disregard of his only daughter; his friend Vinny has been told by an old flame that he’s a dad; and the woman Joe loves, Alexia Finch has taken an office right next to her new boyfriend’s, making Joe’s successful romancing of her even less likely.

But when he shares those viewings of Scarlett with one of the Continuum founders, Iris Mendel, in a mind-bending conversation with the future, it seems he’s going to have to travel to nineteenth Century Paris, to a burning opera house, to rescue that man, Nils Petersen, one of their most successful travellers.

He’ll be travelling in tandem with a cranky woman who’d rather he wasn’t coming along, but armed with the predictive images that Amy’s mad crazy mind-dumps produce. Gabriella Green makes it clear that she works better alone, thank you very much, but grudgingly takes rookie Joe with her, in period costume, false side-burns and all, if it will save Nils. Will they succeed?

Despite Gabrielle’s grumpiness, Joe does eventually learn quite a bit more about time travel: her reluctance to teach him makes for an effective device to give the reader facts without doing it with a massive info-dump. This instalment introduces new characters and expands on the roles that Joe and Amy will play as the story progresses.

Vinny remains a favourite, being an unfailing source of humour: ”I’m terrified of fire… My biggest fear is being barbecued. Let’s be frank, I’ve got some layers of fat on me. I’d burn for hours, like a ginormous man-candle. If I got caught by cannibals, they’d have quite a conundrum on their hands: ‘Do we eat him, or do we use him as a light source?’”

Reading this series in order is highly recommended as there are many spoilers in this book for the previous two and, read as a stand-alone, The Observer Effect would be rather confusing. It will be interesting to see what Nick Jones has in store for his protagonist in The Quantum Chain. This one is the best of the series so far.