The Time Locket Books in Order

The Time Locket starts with a dangerous object and the sort of problem that no sensible person would touch with bare hands. In 1572, a Huguenot bargains for his life with a locket. Centuries later, that same locket still has the power to throw people across time. It is useful, terrifying, and very much the wrong thing to leave in the hands of greedy or vengeful people.

The main pair are Duncan Melville and Erin Barnes. Duncan begins in 1715, a lonely lawyer who already feels as if something important is missing from his life. Erin is living in 2016 and has troubles enough without a stranger appearing in the wrong clothes and the wrong century. She is already locked in a struggle with the Wilkes family, who want the locket badly enough to hurt people for it. When Duncan and Erin meet, attraction is immediate, but safety is not.

The locket is trouble.

In The Whirlpools of Time, Belfrage plays both sides of the time-slip setup. Duncan is flung forward into Erin's present, and then the two of them are thrown back into Duncan's world. That gives the book a nice twist. Duncan has to deal with shock first, then Erin gets the harder task of adapting to early eighteenth-century Scotland. Around them runs a larger story about missing relatives, hidden motives, and a country edging toward the Jacobite rising of 1715. The history matters, but so does the question of whether these two can build any kind of life together in circumstances that make ordinary courtship nearly impossible.

By Times of Turmoil, the focus shifts from first attraction to what happens after love. Duncan and Erin are trying to raise their twin daughters and carve out some peace for themselves in 1718 Pennsylvania. Peace does not cooperate. Old enemies return, new enemies appear, and Erin's refusal to look away when a child is being abused sets off another chain of danger. The book also leans into something the series handles well, the extra risk Erin faces as a woman of colour in a time and place where law, custom, and violence are stacked against her.

What ties the series together is not just the fantasy element. It is the sense that time travel does not free anyone from history. Duncan and Erin still have to eat, work, dodge enemies, and make choices that hurt. The locket can move people from century to century, but it cannot make the past safe.

These books sit at the meeting point of romance, adventure, and historical fiction. They move quickly, but they also leave room for the daily work of trust, family, and survival. If you like time-slip stories where the history is more than wallpaper, and where the magic comes with a genuine cost, this series has a lot to offer.