In Victorian London, where lavish wealth and appalling poverty exist side by side, one man navigates both worlds with ease, the rich, handsome and ingenious Edward Pierce. Who would suspect that a gentleman of breeding could mastermind the theft of the century?

The Great Train Robbery is a bestselling 1975 historical fiction novel written by Michael Crichton. Originally published in the USA by Alfred A. Knopf (then, a division of Random House), it is currently published by Avon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. It is the story of the Great Gold Robbery of 1855, a massive gold heist, which takes place on a train traveling through Victorian era England. The great bulk of the book takes place in London.

The story is a mild representation of the historical events that happened, although the setting can be considered quite accurate. For some reason, the character names are mixed up in the novel, for example the main protagonists William Pierce is changed to Edward Pierce and Edward Agar to Robert Agar.

Timeline is a science fiction novel by Michael Crichton that was published in November 1999. It tells the story of historians who travel to the Middle Ages thanks to the work of a brilliant yet unprincipled entrepreneur who plans to use the technology to enhance historical tourist attractions. The book follows in Crichton's long history of combining technical details and action in his books, addressing quantum physics and time travel.

The novel spawned Timeline Computer Entertainment, a computer game developer that created the Timeline PC game published by Eidos Interactive in 2000. A movie called Timeline based on the book was released in 2003.

Plot summary
In 1999, Professor Edward Johnston heads a team of historians and archaeologists studying a site in the Dordogne region of France where the medieval towns of Castelgard and La Roque stood. Suspicious of the detailed knowledge of the site shown by ITC (their funder), Johnston flies to ITC's headquarters in New Mexico to investigate. Soon the archaeologists begin to uncover modern objects in the ruins, recognizing among them lens of Johnston's eyeglasses. Researchers Chris Hughes, Kate Erickson, André Marek (a medieval re-enactor), and David Stern fly to ITC. Here they meet Robert Doniger, the founder of ITC. They learn that Johnston traveled back in time to the year 1357, to vist the site they were excavating, but has not returned as expected. Doniger insists that they travel back in order to retrieve Johnston. They are persuaded to do so and undergo the matter deconstruction process of transferring their physical selves back to 1357.