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Time Thief (2013)

by Katie MacAlister(Favorite Author)

3.55 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0451417429 (ISBN13: 9780451417428)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Signet

series

Time Thief

review 1: Kiya Mortenson is heading home in an elderly car which lets her down on a mountainside. Out of work, she accepts a lift and work from a passing stranger, Dalton. She has to stay at an Oregon RV campsite and look after his grandmother's five pug dogs. The countryside is dense with sagebrush, blackberries and cedars, the site is isolated and all the disdainful residents are related. The tent she's offered stinks of skunk. Yes, she has to be that desperate.The protagonist isn't so much chatty as gabby; asked who she is and why she's walking the dogs, she gives a lengthy response which doesn't answer the questions. As a contrast we see Dalton driving placidly, talking to someone called Peter who has a strange animus ball of light beside him, referring to 'the mortal police' an... mored 'impure mahrimes'. It does take a while to understand, but a group called Travellers appear to be connected to unexpected deaths, and some deaths are happening by time theft.I was interested in time theft and kept waiting to see what it entailed. I read about blueberry facials for dogs, Peter getting stabbed and falling into Kiya's tent, and many very long conversations, and eventually I found an example of time theft that was an unimpressive ten seconds of deja vu. If someone steals enough time from another person they can use it to travel back in time. But they must pay, usually in silver. Kiya finds the puzzling Peter attractive and follows him around; however he speaks a convoluted form of English and Kiya can't say one sentence when ten will suffice, so the conversations are hard to follow; frankly I couldn't keep making the effort as it seemeed like padding.I thought tighter editing would have helped, there was too much pointless dialogue and time theft should have been explained sooner. I could have done without Kiya's having lengthy discussions with her car, and she wasn't the brightest. The characters and settings are well described and there is some hot adult action. Katie McAlister has written several nattily titled fantasies such as 'Much Ado About Vampires' and 'The Unbearable Lightness of Dragons'. Urban fantasy fans may like it more than I did - it's definitely different.
review 2: I loved this book. I had a really hard time putting it down.This is a basic Katie MacAlister plot. Next door girl meets gorgeous fairly rich man and his cousin, (who is actually the "boy" in this book).They fall in love they get each other in and out of trouble. They solve the crime, all ends well.Did I mention that the guy and his family are supernatural? And that the girl is too?Unlike the Dark Ones books, this book isn't narrated by the girl, but we still hear her inner voice more than I would ever want, because she makes a point of telling every one about her psychologist foster mom, and her lessons about Id, Ego and Super-Ego.Other than that the two main characters are interesting enough to make us root for them, there are a couple of mind bending dialogues, where we "watch" this crazy talk with both characters talking about different things at each other (lucky for us there is narration, so we can see not just what they are saying but what they are thinking, and that gives us context).And did I mention that their flavour of supernatural involves a form of time-travel? I find it refreshing to see some supernaturals that aren't vampires or werewolves, they are able to steal a little bit of time here and there, the victim gets a bit of deja vu, and the thief get a little bit extra life (the guy is over eighty, but looks late twenties or so). And if they are really good they may even steal enough time to travel back a couple of days and change the past/future.The time travel rules aren't well defined yet, but they imply that no one can travel to before he/she was born, so no grandfather paradox, but I would love to see the time travel paradoxes explained. less

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