by Kelley Armstrong
Release Date: May 31, 2022
2022 Minotaur Books
Kindle Edition; 342 Pages
ISBN: 978-1250820006
ASIN: B09CNFSLFG
Audiobook: B09GGZ3HLN
Genre: Fiction / Historical Fantasy / Mystery
3.75 / 5 Stars
Summary
May 20, 2019: Homicide detective Mallory
is in Edinburgh to be with her dying grandmother. While out on a jog one
evening, Mallory hears a woman in distress. She’s drawn to an alley,
where she is attacked and loses consciousness.
May 20, 1869: Housemaid Catriona Mitchell had been enjoying a half-day off, only to be discovered that night in a lane, where she’d been strangled and left for dead . . . exactly one-hundred-and-fifty years before Mallory was strangled in the same spot.
When Mallory wakes up in Catriona's body in 1869, she must put aside her shock and adjust quickly to the reality: life as a housemaid to an undertaker in Victorian Scotland. She soon discovers that her boss, Dr. Gray, also moonlights as a medical examiner and has just taken on an intriguing case, the strangulation of a young man, similar to the attack on herself. Her only hope is that catching the murderer can lead her back to her modern life . . . before it's too late.
May 20, 1869: Housemaid Catriona Mitchell had been enjoying a half-day off, only to be discovered that night in a lane, where she’d been strangled and left for dead . . . exactly one-hundred-and-fifty years before Mallory was strangled in the same spot.
When Mallory wakes up in Catriona's body in 1869, she must put aside her shock and adjust quickly to the reality: life as a housemaid to an undertaker in Victorian Scotland. She soon discovers that her boss, Dr. Gray, also moonlights as a medical examiner and has just taken on an intriguing case, the strangulation of a young man, similar to the attack on herself. Her only hope is that catching the murderer can lead her back to her modern life . . . before it's too late.
My Thoughts
A Rip Through Time is the first book in this series and I quite enjoyed it. Perhaps because there was little romance to speak of as Mallory is literally ripped through time after being attacked in Edinburgh and dumped in the past, thoroughly confused as to what happened and why she was there, so that was a bit plus in my eyes. Furthermore, she is not in her own body, but in the body of a housemaid, Catriona, who has kind of a nefarious past. I thought the contradictions between Mallory's life and Catriona's were fun and enjoyed watching Mallory navigate an entirely different world trying to piece together what happened to her.
Mallory was an interesting character, somewhat uptight and a bit of a workaholic in her present-day life. When she is hurtled into the past, she is forced to depend on the people in her new household for help even if they don't quite understand what is happening to her, leaving them to assume it's the after-effects of the attack. Mallory discovers she works for a brother and sister who are a bit unusual for the time period, the brother being a funeral director who sort of works as an undercover coroner while his sister has a huge interest in the sciences and is, sort of, a chemist. This fascinates Mallory and she is hard-pressed to keep her modern-day knowledge to herself as she insinuates herself into their affairs.
The brother and sister do become suspicious, and I definitely loved this aspect of the book, as I think it is impossible for someone from the future to travel to the past and be inconspicuous, especially someone who is trained in criminology like Mallory. I enjoyed seeing Mallory navigate the events around the myrders, squirm around the destruction of crime scenes, and rack her brain trying to remember historical lessons of when fingerprinting and other such techniques were developed. Because she knew too much for a simple housemaid, even the criminal investigator was suspicious of her actions. Mallory's navigation of how much she should tell, how much she should lie, how to navigate around Catriona'a life, was very entertaining.
For me, the weakest part of the novel was the actual reason for why Mallory was attacked in the first place. While I did enjoy the murder mystery and thought it was nicely plotted, I did feel like the whole time travel aspect, and the consequences, was simply ignored. Rules for time travel do have to be established, and I feel like the author glossed over all of these things in this book. There is no concern about paradoxes, or about a Canadian fitting into nineteenth century Scotland. Yes, she may look like Catriona, but her phrasing is all her own and she would have stood out like a sore thumb.
Verdict
A Rip Through Time is an intriguing time travel/historical mystery. I thought the characters were well-developed and the plot was interesting. There is a lot of set-up in this book, and the author did gloss over the time-travel impact and consequences, something that did not really sit well with me, but I am looking forward to seeing what happens next for Mallory and wondering if she will ever return to modern-day Edinburgh.
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