Saving Mozart

Charles R. Hinckley
Independently Published (2025)
ISBN: 979-8313537818
Reviewed by Terri Stepek for Reader Views (08/2025)

What if you could go back in time to save your personal idol from an untimely death?  Oh, but we know how this goes, don’t we? 

Novels involving time travel tend to have one big plot device in common; characters who think they can go back in time without causing the “Butterfly Effect,” something every sci-fi fan knows about.  The characters are always sure they won’t change history with their little adventure, and yet they always muck it up.  If you’re picking up Charles R. Hinckley’s Saving Mozart expecting something similar, you won’t be disappointed.  But you may be surprised that this is only the tip of the iceberg.  Hinckley has so much more in store for readers.

Protagonists Cal and Emily were childhood sweethearts who lost track of each other years ago.  They meet up again, unexpectedly, as grad students.  Cal is a composer who has studied his hero, Mozart, extensively.  He’s hoping to properly finish Mozart’s Requiem, which was unfinished at the time of Mozart’s early death.  He’s a right-brain thinker, through and through: creative, imaginative, and subjective.

Emily is into physics, and the team she’s working with has just figured out the secret of time travel.  She’s purely left-brained and logical; an analytical, sequential thinker.  Let’s face it, these two characters share very little in the way they see the world, and that is precisely what makes this time travel adventure so very unique and absolutely awesome.

Emily and Cal have a lively, age-appropriate banter.  They go from cutting each other down to having deep discussions in the blink of an eye.  They both display a marvelous sense of humor while maintaining great depth concerning their post-grad work.  They’re also thinking it just might be fun to get together again…maybe.  Okay, that oscillates a bit, depending on the day, the hour, and their location in time.

Hinckley has created an ensemble cast of professors and grad students who will inadvertently cross paths with people of 1790’s Vienna as well as one very scary antagonist who defies description.  The personalities here are well-defined and diverse, genuine and likable.  The reader is drawn to them even when they make incredibly bad decisions, because, well… we get it.  They’re human.  And flawed.  And even though Cal promises to follow the rules, he loses all sense every time he encounters Mozart.  The consequences of this are very bad—especially for Mozart.  Let’s face it, they don’t just encounter the Butterfly Effect- they smash that poor butterfly every time they go back.

I didn’t expect to find so much humor and humanity within this tale and was pleasantly surprised by how fun this story is.  I laughed, shook my head, rolled my eyes, and referred to certain characters in unflattering terms at times.  Yet I was completely hooked, even when I thought I knew what was coming.  Hinckley knows how to reel his audience in, and he does it with great finesse and wit.

 If you are a fan of time travel adventures, alternate history, or simply good action-adventure tales, don’t miss Saving Mozart.  I’ll go even further than that: if you simply enjoy a good thriller with accessible, well-written, characters and a plot that leaves you speechless while making you laugh at the ridiculous banter and I-told-you-so moments, click over now and grab the 5-star raucous read, Saving Mozart by Charles R. Hinckley.  It does not disappoint.