What if you could go back to the pivotal moment in time that shaped your life? Would you try to alter your own fate?Not that long ago, Mal Thomas escaped with his life only through a mixture of good fortune and divine intervention after he and his eclectic team were hired by the world’s most powerful industrialist to promote the alleged second coming of the Messiah. Not everyone involved was as … involved was as lucky as Mal.
After writing a best-selling book about his experiences – and becoming an unlikely spiritual leader along the way – Mal hopes to retreat to the tranquility of his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains. However, another enigmatic billionaire with an equally incredible proposition has other ideas.
Huw Hudson, the man often described as a modern-day Howard Hughes, wants to position his company, Space Rider, as the leader in commercial space tourism. He tries to enlist Mal and his team to help promote it, with one extraordinary twist. Hudson has evidence of an alleged UFO encounter, which he thinks could damage his business plans, and he asks Mal to investigate and manage the breaking news story. Against his better judgment, Mal agrees.
Crisscrossing São Carlos, Miami, London, and Dubai, Mal is forced to keep an unbelievable secret from the FBI and even his closest friends. As he gets pulled deeper and deeper into Hudson’s ambitious plot, he is also forced to confront his deepest fears. The wrong decision has the power to change history.
Valley of Time is the second book in Holden’s Mal Thomas novel series.
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I almost didn’t finish this one – not that it was badly written or anything, just because the beginning felt almost exactly like a repeat of the first book (Sea of Doubt – also reviewed on here)… I persevered – largely because of other people’s reviews, honestly – and in the end can report that it is NOT a repeat of the earlier book, although there were a number of similarities (most notably in the first half). Central among those is my incredulity that anyone who had been in marketing for as long as Mal Thomas would continue to be so willing to suspend disbelief and wholeheartedly believe what CEOs were telling him… I say that a bit tongue-in-cheek, but just a bit – especially in this second book, there were a number of times when I found myself making “WTF?!” notes on my Kindle because I couldn’t really accept that anyone who had been through the things he had would continue marching along so open-heartedly. Still, I suppose Mal’s willingness to look on the bright side of things to the point of needing sunglasses in a closet at night is one of his more endearing qualities – even if it sometimes makes his actions in the story a little hard to swallow…
This book wasn’t as dark as the first Mal Thomas story – I should have suspected that going in, since, unlike the earlier volume, there were no flashback/flashforward cues. Instead, I found myself continuously waiting for the other shoe to drop – that may have been why I found this one slower-going, and if so, it’s entirely on me as a reader and not at all a short-coming of the book. The mystical aspects of this installment were significantly downplayed after Mal’s earlier escapades; I was surprised at this, and found the incorporation of Rahim to feel somewhat stilted and forced as a result. It felt like a thrown in add-on, to connect the two books, rather than an organic element of the story as it did in the earlier book.
I realize my entire review is a comparison of the two – that may not be entirely fair, and if not, I apologize. But the similarities/connections between them were so profound throughout much of VoT that I couldn’t help viewing the book through lenses colored by my consecutive reading of them. I think in hindsight that it might have been better to read them separately, with more time in between, to allow me to distance myself from the expectations engendered by my earlier reading. I think you could probably even read this one as a stand-alone – you wouldn’t entirely understand the Rahim/Mal’s popularity references with the same breadth, but there is probably enough backstory sprinkled in this one to keep you from feeling like you’re behind the eight ball. The writing in this one is engaging and easy enough to fall in to – as was the case with Sea of Doubt – and the focus would then be more on Huw and Space Rider, rather than on what you think Mal will find himself in the midst of this time (which is what happened to me during my reading)..
My review copy was provided by NetGalley.