The Day Time Was Hacked

A book about a centuries-old religious secret being uncovered in modern times isn’t new. A book about time travel and the paradoxes that happen from it also isn’t new. Combining the two, and not coming off like a cheap Da Vinci Code clone is. The Day Time Was Hacked has all the elements of a mediocre thriller, but rises above it to pull those disparate elements together. A death bed secret told by Mary Magdalene to a priest leads to the creation of the Basilica of Sainte Madeleine in Vezelay, and the secret she had carried about Jesus is hidden within the architecture of the church. But it takes a fourteen-year-old boy from Washington, DC and a 37 year-old monk working at Pope’s summer palace at Gandolfo to put those pieces together and outwit an agent from the future who is always one step ahead. By moving back and forth in time, the story unfolds and reunfolds as things that happened in the past, change, and things that happened in the future change back again.

The story is tight and well crafted. The consistent changes in place, time, and alternate history stay understandable and not unmanageable. The characters are well rounded with interesting personalities. There was obviously a great deal of research done in The Day Time Was Hacked, from the history of the Church, Popes, the Vatican to reasonably thought-out theories of time travel. And while the science fiction aspects of the story are instrumental to it, this is still more a thriller than science fiction.