Peter Alastair inherits a Scottish whiskey distillery and plans to distribute in the United States. He meets Shaun Hennessy, a retired scientist, who claims to have mastered limited time travel using an alien artifact. Alastair doesn’t believe him and walks away. In the States, he approaches Issac Templeton to help him set up a distribution network. Alastair has a secret life where he enacts brutal fantasies against unsuspecting women. When a deal goes bad and he loses $1.5 million, he confronts Hennessy, telling him he will fund development of his research, provided he ships the time machine to the States, where he wants to exact revenge against the man who scammed him. Alastair also has ideas how to use the machine to feed his evil alter ego. Playing with time has its own pitfalls, and things don’t work out for Alastair as he intended.
Readers will either hate Time Terminus, or love this beautifully written novella and its cleverly crafted plot sequences. David Gittlin sends readers on a whirlwind journey that stretches the imagination, using smooth narrative and realistic dialogue. With such a short story, Gittlin doesn’t spent much time on character development, letting the plot elements carry the book—some almost distracting in their detail—which creates obvious problems for readers unable to settle down before being jerked from one brief chapter to another. A singular head-scratcher is Alastair’s evil alter ego, but readers will have to resolve that one for themselves. If they can survive the first ten pages, Time Terminus will either disappoint, or in a quirky way, leave a satisfied afterglow.
This book is available on Amazon.
About David Gittlin
After a career in marketing and business communications, David Gittlin studied screenwriting and novel writing at UCLA. His three feature-length screenplays Love Will Find You, Joshua’s Decision, and A Prescription for Happiness have reached the finals or placed in several major screenplay competitions. His first novel, an urban fantasy thriller, Three Days to Darkness, is a recent nominee to the James Kirkwood Prize for creative writing. Entelligent Entertainment recently published Gittlin’s second and third novels, Scarlet Ambrosia and Micromium–Clean Energy from Mars. He has also authored The Silver Sphere trilogy. Mr. Gittlin is also a prize-winning citizen journalist and filmmaker. He lives in Aventura, Florida.
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