As most avid readers know, David Baldacci is one of America’s most prolific writers. He has been translated into over eighty languages and has sold over 150 million copies of his books worldwide. And I must confess that I do not remember reading a single one of them until now. The jacket, featuring a recognizable image of London, pulled me in, and the plot did keep me turning the pages even though it depended on the rather improbable intersection of the three main characters--all from radically different layers of British society--during the Blitz.
A young girl of means, Molly Wakefield, who has been shipped out of the city to avoid the bombing, returns to the family home in posh Chelsea at the age of fifteen. Her mother is in a mental institution in Cornwall and her father has disappeared. She connects with Ignacious Oliver, a mysterious bookstore proprietor in Covent Garden, and a fourteen-year-old street urchin, Charlie Matters, who has lost his family and is now living rough. All three bond as the destruction goes from bad to worse. Molly’s Chelsea home is leveled by bombs; Charlie is running from the law because of possible involvement in the death of a policeman; and Ignacious, while mourning the death of his wife, has a strange visitor who comes and goes at all hours. The trio all end up living in Oliver’s bookstore as the German attacks increase in ferocity.
Every time you think WWII has been picked clean of plots, an author returns to the well with a new twist. Baldacci manages this with practiced ease. The mystery of Oliver's visitor ultimately merges with Molly's father's disappearance, and the ending produces more sadness and violence. I still find the coincidences that throw these three characters together a bit much, but the history remains compelling.
In sum, Strangers in Time is a workmanlike
thriller that holds you right up to the last pages. It is not great
literature, but it sure is vintage Baldacci.
I give it 3.5 out of 5
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