A Matter of Time

(Originally posted on Thursday, 8 August 2013)

The cover is very misleading.

Please read my post from April 2009 to find out about my rating.
Please read my post from May 2009 to learn about Glen Cook’s style of writing.

My rating: 8/10 (low re-reading value)

Another book that was very hard to rate for me. The start of the book, with a premise of time travels and with glimpses into the future and into the past, was great (10/10). An investigation about a man who disappeared 50 years earlier and whose body turned up in 1975 was great too (10/10), but only in the first half of the book. Everything else was more and more disappointing.

There is a side-storyline concerning main character’s son trapped in Vietnam war. At first it seemed that there would be some significant connection between those two plots, but they come together very awkwardly. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I can’t say anything more about the plot.

I must say however that I was very disappointed about the outcome of the above mentioned investigation and about the end of the book as a whole. There was some logic to it, but some things seemed really stretched out. Definitely it was not what I was hoping for.

A Matter of Time was VERY gripping and fun to me in the first half – a perfect book (10/10). However the second half was “only” good (7/10) and the ending was only a little more than average (6/10).
Taking an average of these part-ratings I rate A Matter of Time as a book more than just good, but its re-reading value is low because of the disappointing ending.
(8/10)