The Merchant of Lost Hours

He apologizes before he steals your years, murmuring "I'm sorry. I'll spend it well," and his victims wake older, with a gap in their memory shaped like a man they cannot quite recall.Guardian Meredith Trevelyn follows the trail to a market that trades outside time, where the thief's crime turns out to be the smallest wrong in the room. The reports keep coming. Hours gone. Decades gone. Families that no longer recognize their own. And when Meredith corners the courteous merchant, he drops an hourglass at her feet. Inside is a girl, sixteen, frozen mid-scream. She has been screaming for twenty years. Why does a dying man steal time he cannot keep? Who froze the girl in the glass? And what does a guardian do when the court itself is the crime? For readers of Erik D. Larson's The Kikiloa Chronicles and Beth Williams's Modern Magic, with the bookish warmth of Evie Woods's The Story Collector. Every hour he stole was an act of love, and love will stand trial for it. Start reading The Merchant of Lost Hours today, before another hour slips away.