Reader Score
66%
66% of readers
recommend this book
Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 5 reviews on
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.
"Ben H. Winters is a master of the genre mix-and-match...But even when things get surreal, a rivulet of authentic human grit runs through the core of Winters’ novels, with his underdog characters’ struggles to just get by carrying as much weight as any far-fetched plot twist."