Synopsis:
"Thomas Knight, the protagonist from On the Fifth Day, returns and is faced with a centuries-old mystery surrounding a long-lost and now priceless Shakespearean play. To find it, Thomas will have to enter a story which drags loss and death after it like one of Shakespeare's tragedies, a story bound to time and all it devours."
Paperback
416 pages
Genre: Thriller
ISBN: 0425226239
Published January 6th 2009 by Berkley
Bought from a local used bookstore off the dollar shelves.
This book has everything that my inner Lit geeks loves smashed together into one novel. You've got death and a protagonist on his own and stumbling around on his own trying to solve this giant mystery about the infamous Shakespeare play, "Love Labours Won".
My deep love and appreciation for thrillers is well known. The Bourne Identity and the Girl with The Dragon Tattoo being two of my favorites in this aspect, I feel like this falls flat next to even the good ones in the genre.
What Time Devours starts with the basic "holy crap" beginning, here we witnessed the protagonist, Thomas, freaking out about the dead lady's face mushed against his kitchen window. Well shit, that's crazy. We then go jumping through hoops to discover why his name was clutched in her clammy dead fingers.
The one thing that this book really let me down in was character development. I didn't KNOW Thomas. I didn't FEEL Thomas. Hartley throws characters at us and then kills them off just as quickly but in order to actually be affected by their deaths we have to feel a connection with them, And we don't.
What Time Devours would've been a great escape if it hadn't been for the last 40 pages. I have a hard time buying out of control plot twists when they just pile up one after another. Especially when it kills the entire build up you've spent 350 pages creating.
I will add that this is a part of a series but after that showing I won't be reading it from the beginning. If you have to buy it check your local used bookstore section.
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