I would like to thank Harper Voyager for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – HarperVoyager

Published – Out now

Price – £16.99 hardback £8.99 ebook

There's a tradition in the Sharp family that some possess the Second Sight. But is it superstition, or true psychic power?

Kit Sharp is in Paris, where she is involved in a love affair with the stunning Evelyn Larsen, and working as an archivist, having inherited her historian father's fascination with the Bayeux Tapestry. He believes that parts of the tapestry were made before 1066, and that it was a tool for prediction, not a simple record of events.

The Nazis are also obsessed with the tapestry: convinced that not only did it predict the Norman Conquest of England, but that it will aid them in their invasion of Britain.

Ivy Sharp has joined the Special Operations Executive – the SOE – a secret unit set up to carry out espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance. Having demonstrated that she has extraordinary powers of perception, she is dropped into Northern France on a special mission.

With the war on a knife edge, the Sharp Sisters face certain death. Can their courage and extrasensory gifts prevent the enemy from using the tapestry to bring about a devastating victory against the Allied Forces?

War often creates a desperation to have an edge on the enemy. This is most often technology be they longbows, guns or tanks but history also shows the supernatural is also sought. Only a few decades ago various secret projects were still looking to find people with ESP powers. In Kate Heartfield’s enjoyable historical fantasy novel The Tapestry of Time we have a winding tale of four sisters caught into the immediate aftermath of WW2’s D-Day landings where their special gifts create great danger. Fun is had although I have a few reservations how this all came together.

In Occupied France Its June 1944 and Kit Sharp works in the Louvre under the watchful eyes of Nazis. She focuses on trying to keep priceless artefacts safe from their greedy hands and has a secret relationship with her lover Evelyn. However suddenly kit sees the impossible her sister Ivy appears out of nowhere and vanishes in front of her. This happens again and again, and Kit believes she is in danger. Ivy went back to England when the war started but was noticed by her father’s friend for an unexpected gift for seeing glimpses of the future and has been recruited to become an agent to be parachuted into France to demonstrate the power of this ability. The Sharp family have many family legends about the Second Sight and the other two sisters also have roles to play. But elsewhere in Europe others with the ability want more power for themselves and battle looms.

I had fun with this story, but it felt overall like a tale of two very different halves not quite joining up which slightly reduced my enjoyment. The first half feels a historical fantasy and Heartfield works heard after setting up the initial mystery of the vanishing Ivy in 1944 to an earlier war period starting from 1940. Heartfield is always very good for making a period come to life and the atmosphere of occupied France and a Britain trying to keep its head above water feels tense and on edge from blackouts, rations and suspicion on those who may know what is about to happen. The Sharp family is built up primarily focusing on ivy but we also get to meet her academic father, her more cerebral sister Rose who goes to work at Bletchley park and Helen the more traditional WW2 Land Girl who is carrying her fiancé’s child outside of wedlock. This half really works for me you get to feel the family tensions and we learn all may have hidden gifts they know or hide. As time passes, we jump towards Ivy’s special training, which itself is dramatic and tension filled and even enhanced training to boost her Second Sight before a daring infiltration by parachute into France which again really works as a sequence into the unknown.

Once though Ivy and Kit meet up, I felt a big tonal shift. We move much more into WW2 supernatural action and the detailed exploration of the period and fine character work for me moves into more straightforward good guys versus Nazis. Nothing wrong watching Nazis being stopped – should happen more often! However, we suddenly get a menacing figure from the first half then turn into the story’s major antagonist and a sudden infodump on his masterplan, the powers all get ramped up to the max and the subtle hints of why the Bayeaux tapestry are so important to the story get again explained without much forewarning. I also found that the two UK sisters felt more plot pieces than characters – quickly covered then abandoned for large chunks of the story until having something to do. Instead, this second half is much more action and heroics but didn’t really feel earned or fleshed out.

Overall, this feels a story that a few hundred pages more to let the second half breathe would have been really useful here so that tonally the story lines up and everyone has a full story arc. I really enjoyed Kit and Ivy’s tale so were the wider family tales that needed?  You can settle in and enjoy this story but for me its slightly misses being a fully satisfactory reading experience but if you’re in the mood for Nazis being beaten then come this way!