H. Beam Piper’s Time Crime (1955) is a taut novella in his Paratime series, featuring the Paratime Police — an elite force that polices the countless parallel timelines of Earth’s history. When a ruthless gang of slavers begins raiding vulnerable alternate-timeline civilisations, Inspector Verkan Vall must track them across parallel worlds before the operation triggers an inter-timeline war. Piper’s plotting is clean and urgent, and the world-building is deceptively rich.
This free EPUB makes Time Crime available in a clean reformatted edition for any device. If you enjoy alternate-history science fiction — Keith Laumer’s Imperium series or the broader Paratime canon — this Piper novella is essential reading, delivering genuine suspense alongside its inventive premise.