BLOG TOUR: Valley of Time by Jeremy D. Holden @smithpublicity @jeremydholden
Valley of Timeby Jeremy D. Holden
Smith Publicity
🔥 HAPPY PUBLISHING DAY 🔥
Hey everyone! Kicking off the Valley of Time BLOG TOUR today! This is the second book in the Mal Thomas Mystery Series. Continue below to see a synopsis, about the author, an excerpt, my review and a glimpse at the first book in the Series, Sea of Doubt, linking you to my review for that book as well. Happy reading!
For those on Bookstagram - stay tuned for an upcoming giveaway for 2 paperback and 2 ebook copies! (Come follow me @wherethereadergrows to enter!)
Valley of Time
The Greatest Journey Ever Taken
A Mal Thomas Mystery Novel (Book
#2)
By Jeremy D. Holden
If you could go back to a pivotal
moment and change your fate, would you?
TIMELY NEW NOVEL TACKLES MASS PERSUASION AND CONSPIRACY IN A
THRILLING ADVENTURE THAT SPANS SPACE, TIME & THE WORLD’S GREATEST CITIES!
“Jeremy D. Holden has done it again
with Valley of Time! His gifted
writing style and humorous protagonist, Mal Thomas, take us on a time-bending
journey in an epic story of adventure and love.”
-- A.J. Tata, national best-selling
author of Besieged
In October 2016, author Jeremy D.
Holden introduced readers to one of contemporary fiction’s most charismatic new
protagonists with Sea of Doubt: The Greatest Story Ever Sold - A Mal Thomas Mystery.
An “oddly believable […], swift, unusually entertaining journey through
present-day public relations” (Kirkus
Reviews), Sea of Doubt followed
Mal and his team of mad men and women as they embarked upon an extraordinary
assignment – promoting the alleged second coming of the Messiah at the behest
of a powerful and mysterious industrialist – and brought to bookshelves a
laugh-out-loud funny, eerily timely story about the media, alternative facts,
and modern society’s endless obsession with fame.
On November 5, 2017 – not
incidentally the day our clocks “fall back” per Daylight Savings Time! – Holden
continues Mal Thomas’s adventures with the release of Valley of Time: The Greatest
Journey Ever Taken [Clean Publishing], the second book in the ‘Mal
Thomas Mystery’ series.
A sequel that also works as a
standalone novel, Valley of Time sees Mal approached by another enigmatic
billionaire with an incredible proposition: Huw Hudson – think Richard Branson
meets Elon Musk plus a dash of Howard Hughes – wants to position his company,
Space Rider, as the leader in commercial space tourism.
Of course, there’s a twist: Hudson has evidence of an alleged
UFO encounter, which he thinks could damage his business plans, and needs Mal
and his team to investigate and manage the breaking news story.
Mal discovers a deeper
purpose at work as he crisscrosses Sao Carlos, Miami, London, and Dubai in
furtherance of Hudson’s audacious ambition while being forced to keep an
unbelievable secret from the FBI, and even his closest friends. A page-turning
thriller that follows the launch of a massive global PR campaign to promote one
of the most seismic events in human history, Valley of Time ultimately corners
Mal into confronting his deepest fears – and takes readers on a journey that
will challenge the very core of our beliefs about space and time.
“Valley of Time provides a window into the modern world of
digital and social media-driven mass persuasion,” states Holden, who is himself
an award-winning advertising executive who has counseled some of the world’s
most recognizable names and brands.
“It also poses some crucial questions,” he continues. “What
if you could go back to a pivotal moment in time that shaped your life? Would
you try to alter your fate? And what if the conspiracy theorists aren’t
actually nutty at all – what if they’re right?”
Fast-paced, full of
wit and humor, and sure to delight fans of authors like Carl Hiassen and Nick
Hornby, Valley of Time: The Greatest Journey Ever Taken is a truly
original novel from one of contemporary fiction’s most thrilling new voices –
and will be available for purchase in mass-market paperback and e-book editions
wherever books are sold as of November 5, 2017.
About the Author:
Jeremy D. Holden is the author of the Mal Thomas Mystery Series,
which to date includes the critically acclaimed novels Sea of Doubt (2016)
and Valley of Time (2017)
– with a third release planned for 2018. An award-winning creative professional
and accomplished author, Jeremy has earned many of the advertising industry’s top
honors, including the prestigious “Gold Effie” (the Golden Globe of the ad
world). His first book, Second
That Emotion: How Decisions, Trends, and Movements Are Shaped [Prometheus
Books, 2012], explores how movements are created in the political, cultural,
and commercial realms, and received attention from national media outlets,
including Fast
Company, The Huffington
Post, CNN, and NPR.
A UK native, Jeremy currently lives and
works in Raleigh, North Carolina where he is President and Chief Strategy
Officer of Clean, an
award-winning integrated branding agency. He also teaches at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the School of Media and Journalism. A popular
speaker and facilitator, Jeremy has run workshops with fellow authors Malcolm
Gladwell and Professor Dan Ariely.
Find
Jeremy D. Holden on Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads
and at https://jeremydholden.com/
Excerpt from the Book:
Not a tremendous amount happens in Llandderfel in the
county of Denbighshire in North Wales. The undulating valleys that decorate the
countryside are beautiful as I recall from a school hiking trip I took when I
was a boy. The people are warm and welcoming, it rains a lot, and of course
they love their rugby and to sing in celebration of their victories.
Huw Hudson was undoubtedly the most famous person ever to
come from Llandderfel, where he was born in 1970, a few years after me, but a
world away from the relatively privileged upbringing I’d experienced across the
border in England.
The Welsh name Huw—more commonly spelled Hugh by Saesons
(or Saxons) like me—derives from the German name Hugo, which means simply
heart, mind, and spirit. And no three nouns could have better captured the life
and the character of the man who would rise to international wealth and
notoriety as the visionary leader of Space Rider.
The people who knew Huw best variously described him as
driven, combative, and charismatic, and it was these qualities combined with
his blazing intelligence that elevated him from the humblest of beginnings to
the apex of the global business world.
Huw’s mother had died tragically while giving birth to her
only child, and he’d been raised by his devoted father and best friend,
Llewellyn, who was a gamekeeper at the nearby Palé Hall country estate.
Llewellyn taught his son to track and hunt and had tutored him into becoming an
expert shot with a rifle while still a young boy.
Palé Hall is situated in the nearby county of Glyndwr,
which takes its name from Owain Glyndwr. He was either the rightful Prince of
Wales in the time of King Henry IV, or the treacherous leader of the Welsh
rebellion, depending on who taught you history, after his patron King Richard
II was deposed.
In his time, Owain Glyndwr was a Renaissance man, educated
in law, a committed supporter of the arts, a diplomat, and a soldier. A
legendary Welsh hero also known as the Prince of Powys Fadog, the Lord of
Glyndyfrdwy, he was ultimately defeated by the English forces and incarcerated
in the Tower of London, never to be seen or heard from again.
Some say he escaped, others that he was executed, but what
isn’t in dispute is that the grandson of one of his descendants, Owen Tudor,
ultimately ascended to the throne of England becoming Henry VII, and the Tudor
dynasty was born. Perhaps Braveheart should have profiled the life of
Owain Glyndwr rather than William Wallace, if the producers had wanted to tell
a story of equal bravado, as well as engineer a happier ending.
Although born of humble stock, to many in North Wales, Huw
Hudson was a modern-day manifestation of their ancient hero, Owain Glyndwr. He
bled for Ddraig Goch, the Red Dragon, and for many they saw him as the
hallowed Mab Darogan, the Man of Destiny.
A product of the grammar school system in the United
Kingdom, which selected the brightest working class children to receive a more
academically challenging education. Huw excelled in math, science, philosophy,
and the arts, as well as on the rugby field, and he was offered a combined
academic and sporting scholarship by Oxford University.
Unlike myself, he accepted his place at Christ Church
College and went on to achieve a double first in astrophysics, in the process
becoming an Oxford Blue three years in succession, playing scrum-half for its
celebrated rugby team. While Huw distributed the ball for the dark blues, the
team never lost a match to the light blues of Cambridge.
On leaving Oxford, Huw was variously recruited by
organizations as prestigious and as diverse as NASA, GE, and a Seattle-based
online retail start-up called Amazon. But ultimately, in a move that didn’t
surprise his friends in the slightest, he opted to join the Royal Air Force,
having always wanted to fly jets.
He rose to the rank of flight lieutenant in record time and
flew one of the earliest Eurofighter 2000 jets, latterly known as the Typhoon,
on several covert missions over the Persian Gulf and received the Distinguished
Flying Cross.
Having fulfilled his
lifelong ambition of becoming a jet fighter pilot, Huw left the RAF with the
characteristically modest goals of both becoming the richest person on the
planet and changing the face of aviation.
My Review:
Mal is back and this time he's being asked to promote space travel with the possibility of meeting life elsewhere. We are basically taken in the same direction as Mal was taken in the first book, Sea of Doubt. The first part of the book is basically the same. We meet the main characters again, he's approached the same way again and we live in a sense of deja vu if you've read the first in this series. I do much prefer this premise of space travel and extraterrestrials much better than the premise of the first book with the second coming of the Messiah.
Once again, we get to see how Mal uses his expert advertising skills to convince people to want to come on this exploration. As we near closer and closer every day to the possibility of living on another planet, those in the elite money bracket will be afforded the opportunity to potentially do so! If you believe that there is life outside of Earth, then why wouldn't you want to be the FIRST to meet and/or observe them? Quite interesting and definitely had my interest.
What I love the most about these characters is Mal's relationship with his wife. The author expresses beautifully how much in love they are after decades of marriage and how much Mal admires and listens to his wife's opinion and how she supports him, even when she doesn't agree with him. Love! And based on the author's notes at the end of the book, you can see that he feel the same about his wife. So adorable!
It's hard not to compare this book to the first one - especially with reading them back to back. Also since the beginnings of both books are extremely similar. This time we don't have the huge, out of left field twist and instead get a more interesting and easier read. I think you could also read this as a stand alone though there are some references to book one that might not be crystal clear if you haven't read the first. Overall still the very intriguing concept of using social media to sell something outrageous to the world.
Want to know what thoughts of the first in the series? Check HERE!
Thanks so much to Smith Publicity for these copies - it's always nice to read series books back-to-back!
Follow along the blog tour:
Monday, November 6 - JESSICAMAP REVIEWS (www.jessicamapreviews.com)
Thursday, November 9 - ABOOKTASIA (www.abooktasia.wordpress.com)
Friday, November 10 - THE WRITING TRAIN (www.thewritingtrain.com)
Saturday, November 11 - BROOKE'S BOOKS (www.instagram.com/brookes_books_)
Sunday, November 12 - WHITTERZZ M (www.whitterzzm.wordpress.com)
Monday, November 13 - MELISSA'S BOOK WORLD (www.melissasbookworld.com)
Tuesday, November 14 - MEL'S MEANDERINGS (www.mellaing.wordpress.com)
Wednesday - November 15 - THE OUTSPOKEN YAM (www.theoutspokenyam.com)
Thursday - November 16 - THE QUIRKY BOOK NERD (www.thequirkybooknerd.wordpress.com)
Thursday - November 16 - CAMILLEA READS (www.camilleareads.wordpress.com)
Friday - November 17 - ME AND BOOKS (www.meandbooks.altervista.org)
Saturday - November 18 - A BOOK AND A LATTE (www.abookandalattee.blogspot.com)
Sunday - November 19 - ABOOKTROPOLIS (www.abooktropolis01.blogspot.com)
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