Customer Reviews

What Time Devours

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For those who have already read AJ Hartley's work, What Time Devours definitely lives up to expectations. Like On The Fifth Day and The Mask of Atreus, this is a great thriller with plenty of action and drama. This time, though, Hartley also shows us a more thoughtful and reflective Thomas as he grapples with more than just "the bad guys." Definitely worth reading.

Finally, A. J. Hartley's protagonist Thomas Knight returns to thrill Hartley's readers. In Hartley's latest novel What Time Devours,the fast-paced action begins in the first pages as Knight discovers the terrifying face of a dead woman against his window.

Because the novel opens with a murder leading to multiple layers of intrigue, What Time Devours might easily be cast as an intense thriller. However, readers should not ignore the historical and literary accuracy woven between theft, murder, and deceit. Through Thomas Knight, Hartley reveals his own knowledge of European history and geography. Knight's character also appears quite knowledgeable about the trends and topics in current scholarly work about William Shakespeare. One might easily compliment Hartley's thorough research, but this reader senses that the preparations for this novel were too enjoyable to categorize as "research."

Read What Time Devours. You will enjoy the story, the thrills, and the characters.

To my delight, Thomas Knight, the protagonist of A.J. Hartley's On The Fifth Day, has returned in the fascinating new mystery, What Time Devours. The new book combines exciting story developments and interesting historical and literary details. It is fast-paced and enormously entertaining.

The new book involves a lost Shakespeare play called Love's Labours Won. It is set around Chicago, London and Stratford in England as well as the Champagne region of northern France. Following the appearance of a dead woman leaning against his kitchen window, Thomas Knight, an Evanston High School English teacher, finds himself caught in a series of developments that sends him searching for a lost play which was, according to some, written by Shakespeare.

One surprising pleasure of What Time Devours is that it is a wonderful travel mystery. Those of you who have visited Stratford, England, should fondly reminisce about Shakespeare's birth place - - a picture post-card timbered house with an exquisite garden, as well as ancient halls and the streets of Stratford - - as Thomas Knight pursues the mystery of the lost play. Those of you who have visited Westminster Abbey are likely to empathize with Tom: " In this building, every monarch of England had been crowned since William the Conqueror in 1066... The depth of antiquity, the weight of it, was unlike anything Thomas had ever experienced."(Read Chapter 24.)

If you are a European history buff you should find the book highly intriguing. For example, when was the last time you read about the Kingdom of Navarre? How does it relate to Shakespeare's plays or Mary Antoinette? (Read Chapter 44.)

Enjoy the book!

I thoroughly enjoyed A.J. Hartley's debut, The Mask of Atreus, and thought he squandered most of his promise in his sophomore effort, On the Fifth Day. Thus, I wasn't sure what to expect when I started reading What Time Devours. What I found was a book that displayed the best and worst qualities of the other two works.

Contrary to what has been said elsewhere, What Time Devours is not a page-turning thriller. Long stretches of the book are filled with exposition, where Hartley (through his characters) pontificates on a variety of topics; like XTC's music, champagne manufacturing, and the current state of Shakespeare scholarship. In fact, there is so much exposition that it threatens to overwhelm the book. But, when the story does finally move into action mode, it really takes off. The book's prose shifts from somnambulant to taut, the mood changes from turgid to suspenseful, and the characters go from introspective to interesting. While it's too bad that there aren't more such action scenes in the book, those that do populate the text save the story from mediocrity.

Hartley is going to have to work on finding a way to more seamlessly merge his intellectual musings with his action instincts, because the dichotomy that's present in his writing does not bode well for his future books. Still, if readers can overlook the result that this dichotomy is currently producing, they'll find a decent thriller in What Time Devours.

Having read Hartley's previous books, "The mask of Atreus" and "On the fifth day" I eagerly awaited the publication of his latest thriller which I managed to find last week in Philadelphia airport.
I have not been disappointed.
This book is a triumph as it possesses all the elements one wants in a great mystery and it is so well crafted. It is full of action, intrigue and some unexpected twists of plot.
The writing is excellent and full of pace. It will grip you from the outset and have you burning the midnight oil as you will not be able to put it down.
What a fantastic start to this New Year!
Read and enjoy!
If you should read this Mr. Hartley Please, Please let's have more.

High school teacher Tom Knight is in a Shakespearean frame of mind as he goes on the hunt for "Love's Labor Won", the fabled lost play attributed to the bard and hotly sought after for centuries. Knight's never believed in its existence, not until a celebrity writer and her agent, one of Tom's former students, are murdered within a day of each other, in his own neighborhood. Tom being Tom, he drops everything at takes off for Europe. In the meantime, he receives some painful news from his estranged wife, Kumi, who lives in Japan and has just received a diagnosis of breast cancer.

What Time Devours is a much more soul-searching adventure than its predecessors. True, Knight is still his old, wildly impulsive self, hurling himself into one impossible, life threatening situation after another, without a glimmer of forethought. But he's been missing Kumi and hoping for a reconciliation, and the shock of her illness has brought him to the sobering recognition of the brevity of life and the vagaries of fate. Love and loss are major themes in Shakespeare's writing, and spending time in Stratford-upon-Avon embeds them firmly in Tom's consciousness. He is fully aware of "...the pointlessness and stupidity of the whole thing", but no amount of threat or violence can shake him off this mission.

There is a tremendous dose of the wildly unlikely in this novel, but if you simply accept that, it's a heck of a good story. Author Hartley has created some character gems, such as the verger from Westminster Abbey who assists Knight, the sadly eccentric mystery writer mourning for her long dead daughter, and the fierce concierge who guards the door at the Shakespeare Institute. He takes a hefty whack at scholarly pretension, and also includes a few of the Bard's sonnets' which do much to illuminate Tom's interior struggles. As for the mystery, it's first rate, with plenty of zigs and zags, and an appropriately spooky setting for its denouement.

Those of you who have read other reviews I've written will know that I like reading all kinds of thrillers. From the intrigue of Tom Clancy to the conspiracy of Robert Ludlum to the killers of Jeffrey Deaver, the pace and surprise of the genre keep me turning the pages. I'm always on the lookout for authors with new approaches. I picked up A.J. Hartley's book, "What Time Devours" ,hoping to find such an author.

I believe that I have. I really enjoyed this book. The premise sounds fairly straightforward. The book begins when schoolteacher Thomas Knight has to deal with not one but two murders, one on his very doorstep. The only clue he has is that one of the victims was a former student who may have discovered the manuscript of a lost Shakespeare play.

The truth turns out to be somewhat more complicated. Knight is not satisfied to let it go, driven by a combination of curiosity, fear, and stubbornness. His search for the truth takes him from Chicago to England to France, and each answer he finds yields more questions. The lost play may not even exist, but more than one person is willing to kill for the chance to find out.

There is action throughout, though not of the non-stop variety. Hartley mixes quite a bit of historical detail with his narrative, pulling you into scenes that feel more three-dimensional than in many thrillers. Two things in particular stood out about the book. The first is the use of language. It's hard to put my finger on, but the most direct way to say it is that he displays a great variety in his choice of words. Not to the point where the reading becomes ponderous, but enough to cause me to stop every now and then to enjoy a specific sentence.

The second thing I think he did well was to choose a single point of view from which to tell the story, that of the main character Thomas Knight. Many thrillers effectively use three or four points of view in weaving multiple threads together, but that wouldn't have worked here. Keeping us inside Knight's head made the stakes feel greater than they actually were.

So is there anything not to like about it? Well, there's almost always something. The one negative about the book in my opinion is that the pace in the first half is uneven. We don't know enough about the mystery yet to feel that the various background and description really tie into the plot. Midway through, enough pieces come together that the pace starts to feel more consistent.

I contacted the author to see if he wanted to share anything about the book. Among other things, he had this to say:

"[In many thrillers,] even when death is given real weight (whether that's through fear of getting killed or grief when someone else is) it tends--for the reader--to be made safe by the genre. After all, most of us don't spend much of our lives in firefights or being chased by axe wielding maniacs. For most of us, death is ordinary and unsensational. . . I didn't feel like I could write a suspense novel involving Shakespeare without grappling a bit with his sense of the pervasiveness of mortality. It's still supposed to be a fun read, of course, but I hope I float the occasional idea or moment that takes some of the air out and leaves the reader with something a bit more than just a distracting thrill."

I hope you give the book a try and enjoy it. I know I did.

First Sentence: Thomas Knight froze, one hand on the coffeepot, the other extended to the faucet over the sink.

The morning starts badly for high school English teacher, Thomas Knight. The body of an unknown dead woman is pressed up against his kitchen window. He then receives a call from a former student, David Escolme, who asks that Thomas come see him at the Drake Hotel in Chicago as he needs the help of someone who is familiar with the writings of Shakespeare.

Arriving at the hotel, Thomas finds a frantic Escolme. Someone has removed several pages of, what is purported to be, "Love's Labour Won," one of the missing Shakespeare plays. When Escolme is murdered, it sends Thomas off on an international search for the play, while trying to stay alive himself.

As a fan of Shakespeare, I was really looking forward to this book. It definitely has a creepy grabber of an opener. Unfortunately, it delivers less than it promises and both the writing and pacing were very uneven. The book, for the most part, reads very flat.

There is very little character development beyond the protagonist. We are almost one quarter of the way through when we learn about the situation with Thomas' marriage. However, I did like Thomas' thoughts and realizations about his wife and their marriage when she is facing a health crisis.

Thomas makes some decisions that almost fall into the "too-stupid-to-live" category and he is fairly casual about breaking the law. There are massive coincidences. The timing of when Thomas is in threatening situations becomes overwhelming convenient. Interesting observations about the academic community and just how tightly focused is it; everyone knows everyone and if not enough people know you, you are no one.

There are constant references to Thomas being involved in solving his brother's death the year before. If found it annoying as, rather than giving information, it felt to be a plug to read the previous book.

The suspense and action scenes are the strongest and most interesting part of the story. There is a very enjoyable reference to "The Da Vinci Code." The historical information, and that on Shakespeare and his plays, is fascinating. The sense of place is very strong with wonderful descriptions of the various locales.

It's not a terrible book, but it's not great either.

Previous reviewer Paul Wilson was spot on. The ending of this otherwise reasonably good novel was a real let down. Caution, spoiler ahead: I mean, what's the point of the chase if the chased object just disappears. It makes the whole thing sort of irrelevant. And the book certainly did drag in places.

I really wanted this to be better than it turned out to be. The author is a Shakespearean scholar & is a decent writer - not fabulous, but some lovely bits of characterization. His plotting, however, is a little predictable. It sort of tries to be a cross between the The Da Vinci Code & one of those British drawing room mysteries (The Butler did it to Miss Scarlet in the library with the candlestick ... owait ...), but somehow manages to be neither.

It was a decent bit of "I bought it at the grocery store" reading, but not an author I'll look for again.