The Water Clock follows reporter Philip Dryden as he tries to find the connection between two bodies found within days of each other, but murdered almost 30 years apart. Stubbs, the police detective assigned to the case, barters with Dryden: exclusive inside information in exchange for good press in Dryden's newspaper articles to counter Stubbs' impending demotion.

Dryden ups the ante and pushes for Stubbs to release a file that has been closed to the reporter for two years, a file which may shed some light on the accident that put Dryden's wife into a coma. As Dryden searches for information to solve the case and gets closer to the identity of the killer, the killer starts getting closer to Dryden, leaving notes under his comatose wife's hospital pillow. Dryden's search for answers quickly becomes a race to solve the mystery before his wife's life, or his own, is taken.

Jim Kelly's novel is lush with flowery, almost poetic prose, and rich descriptions of scenery and weather. This is the inherent problem; a thriller does not benefit from the verbosity of constant dramatic description and the pacing suffers greatly from it. Add in the fact this book read like a scavenger hunt of writing errors (dangling participles, lots of sentence fragments, rearrangement of sentence structure to force sentences to fit in the typeface without hyphenation) and you end up with a book that's a chore to read. Kelly would benefit more from exploring a genre that would be better in tune with his style but, as the cover proclaims this book 'A Philip Dryden Thriller,' it is unlikely he will stray from the mystery shelves with a potential recurring character on his hands. This proves unfortunate for both the author and his possibly under-realized talent, and even more so for the reader squandering both money and time on his novels.
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Paperback: 309 pages
Publisher: Leisure; Reprint edition (November 27, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0843960000
ISBN-13: 978-0843960006
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