Big Time

I thoroughly enjoyed many things about Big Time by Ben H. Winters (publication day March 5, 2024)!

Winters brought me in to the story immediately–we learn that Allie, a teacher with a young child, has been abducted by a woman who is taking her . . . somewhere. Allie escapes in Maryland, not without doing damage to her abductor, Desiree, and getting injured herself.

We next meet Grace Berney, taking care of her elderly mother. Grace has a small townhome with her mother and her teenage nonbinary child, River. Grace works for the FDA, specifically the Center for Devices and Radiological Health, and is something of an expert at ports–medical devices that are implanted into humans for reasons such as making it easier to access a vein for chemotherapy.

Grace is asked to come into the office to help identify a portacath that a hospital has identified in a patient in Maryland who has showed up at the hospital without identification and with a shaky memory. Maybe the device registration can help figure out who she is? Ever the dutiful employee, Grace spends her evening tracking down the portacath and where it had been used, and in the process becomes intrigued about the woman–the patient–that has it.

Alternating chapters between Allie’s, Desiree’s, and Grace’s perspectives, Winters keeps the reader in suspense about what is really going on for a long time. Allie’s not sure who she is, as memories come into her head that she can’t explain and that don’t fit with her knowledge of herself as a teacher and mother. Desiree continues to be on Allie’s trail, but we don’t know who has paid for her to find Allie and what is intended when she finds her and delivers Allie to them. And Grace can’t let go the image of Allie, bereft, in the hospital, and also is on her trail, but from the perspective of the companies who implanted the device into Allie. River assists her with tech support, but things quickly get very strange, with Grace coming across the idea of time being a “physical phenomenon of the universe that we do not perceive but possess” and which “can be manipulated.”

I will say no more of the plot to avoid spoilers. But I especially loved the fact that Grace, who really is the the heroine of the story, is a nondescript 48-year old mom, who trained as a lawyer and is a government bureaucrat! She struggles with back pain, with dealing with her multigenerational living situation, and for once, doing something spontaneous with her job. I loved that there was queer representation, and River had a major role to play in their mom’s ability to figure out what was actually going on and save the day.

I’ve read some of Winters’ books before, but now I have to systematically go back and read everything that I’ve missed. This was so good! And it was weight-neutral. The only description of any characters’ weight was in Grace’s depiction of her mother–as what she would look like in thirty years and fifty pounds–but it’s neutral.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review. And full disclosure–I took a writing class with the author years ago when he lived in Indianapolis.