The Hanging Tree timeline

Imported from tumblr.

The big question here is: when does this book take place? Unlike every other book in the series so far, Peter never gives us a date, a month, or even a season to go by. I’m not saying I feel personally attacked but MAYBE I KINDA DO. What we do know is:

• It’s been roughly two years since the events of Whispers Under Ground, which happened from December 18-27th, 2012 or maybe 2011 since 2012 didn’t happen
• It’s after February 2014, as George Thames-McAllister’s car was registered between September 2013 and February 2014
• Peter’s dad’s gig is raising money for the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone; the first recorded cases of Ebola in that country were in May 2014 and it hit epidemic stage in September
• School and university are in for Beverley and Olivia, so it’s September or later
• Peter comments “most of the leaves were still on the trees”, so it must be the second half of the year rather than the first
• The sun is only starting to set in the early evening (“two hours after the school rush”), so it can’t be later than late October (when the clocks go back).
• All of which adds up to…well, your guess is as good as mine, but somewhere in September-October 2014, almost exactly two years after Moon Over Soho. The book takes place over two weeks, so it starts no later than mid-October. I’m going to say the first two weeks of October, as an approximation.
• Which means we have a whopping fourteen-month gap between Foxglove Summer and this book – so much for Lesley’s mysterious one-year deadline, which came and went before this book even starts!

( The timeline )

Take-aways: I was expecting this to maybe be a book that covered a longer stretch of time, in the style of RoL and BH, but instead it’s another two-week case (MoS, WUG, and FS all also cover approximately two weeks of book time) with a whopping long between-book gap to inch us that much closer to the present day (and make room for Night Witch, Black Mould, and the forthcoming The Furthest Station). My best guess for dates is October 5th through October 16th for the main action, but it could honestly start anywhere between September 7th and October 12th. We seem to have traded certainty about the year (2014) for total uncertainty about the actual date.