Big Time
A Novel
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3.8 • 19 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In this "virtuoso,” “jaw-dropping” and “stellar technological thriller” (Publishers Weekly, Starred Review), a mother engulfed by her own mid-life crisis stumbles upon a dark conspiracy to harvest and sell people's time.
What if time could be taken from us—the minutes, the hours, the years of our lives, extracted like organs taken for transplant? What would it mean for the world? And what would it do to the person from whom it’s taken?
Grace Berney is a mid-level bureaucrat in the Food and Drug Administration, a woman who once brimmed with purpose but somehow turned into a middle-aged single mom with a dull government job and a melancholy sense that life has passed her by. Until the night a strange photo comes across her desk, of a young woman in a hospital bed who has been subjected to a mysterious procedure. Against orders and against common sense, Grace sets out to bring the girl to safety, and finds herself risking her job, her future, and her life on whether she can find the missing girl before an obsessive and violent mercenary who’s also looking. Big Time is a fast-paced thriller and a metaphysical mystery about the very nature of our lives.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Grab your popcorn and settle in with a smart, dark, and puzzling science fiction thriller. Who is the woman who wakes up confused in a hospital bed with a mysterious new medical device in her chest? Is she Allie, a wife, mother, and middle-school teacher—or Ana, a rebellious punk rock bassist who apparently died in a car accident when she was 16? Grace, an exhausted but empathetic federal employee investigating the strange device, is on her side, whoever she is. Contractor Desiree, tasked with delivering Allie/Ana to her mysterious client, very much is not. Author Ben H. Winters (The Last Policeman) has created a roller coaster of a thriller that’s also a probing examination of identity and life. We thought we knew where this story was heading, but it totally surprised us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Winters (Stranger) plays with readers' expectations like a virtuoso in this stellar technological thriller, which opens on a nightmare situation and never takes its foot off the gas. New mom Allie Zerkofsky, a self-described "regular boring middle-school teacher," and her infant, Rachel, are abducted from a New Jersey playground by two assailants, who separate them. When Allie asks her abductor what will happen to Rachel, however, her abductor says she has no idea what baby Allie is referring to. Allie's responding howls of grief distract the kidnapper, leading to a car crash and enabling Allie to escape. Winters then introduces Grace Berney, an attorney for the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, whose boss asks her to trace an unusual medical device implanted in an unidentified amnesiac female patient—whose injuries readers will recognize as matching Allie's. Grace's digging leads to the defunct Substance Material Group, a business that had been exploring a new theory about time. Winters's many jaw-dropping plot twists are always grounded in pitch-perfect depictions of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. Blake Crouch fans will be in heaven.
