To be clear this (the first in a series) is a time travel, historical fiction with a light dusting of maybe implied possible romance. It should not be confused with the author’s A Stitch In Time series which are time travel, historical fiction, and romance novels. Am I putting that disclaimer here because I was confused about the similarity in the series name? Yes. Yes, I am.
In this series, we start in Edinburgh on May 20, 2019. Vancouver police detective Mallory Atkinson is visiting the city, to be there for her grandmother who is on hospice and whose time left is measured at this point in days. Out for a jog to clear her head, Mallory follows the sound of a woman in distress down an alley, where she is attacked, strangled and ends up losing consciousness. And when she wakes up ….
She is still in Edinburgh. It’s still May 20th. But it is May 20th, 1869, and Mallory is now inhabiting the body of Catriona Mitchell, a housemaid who was also attacked in the same alley Mallory was, and who was left for dead there. So Mallory now has to try and solve the mystery of the time travel, fake it until she makes it as a Victorian-era housemaid, and untangle the history of the woman whose body she’s jumped into.
Thankfully Catriona has not exactly Victorian-era standard employers, her employer is Dr. Duncan Gray, an undertaker who on the side assists the local police force with police investigations as a medical examiner. Coincidently he is in the process of assisting the police investigation into the murder of a young man, who was strangled just like Catriona almost was in 1869, and how Mallory was in 2019.
I am a Kelley Armstrong fan and this book (the first in a series) just checks a lot of my ‘things I enjoy reading about boxes’:
- Time Travel
- A Mystery (I am no detective, so I am here for the ride in mystery novels)
- Victorian time frame setting
This is the first book in a series and while it tells a self-contained story around the hunt for a killer, it also lays out some plot points to be followed up in future novels (presumably, as of this review I’ve only read the first two books). Beyond having to do all that there is a lot going on in the book, this thing is stuffed.
You have the mystery of how Mallory time travelled, the mystery of who is committing the murder (and a small spoiler it becomes murders) that Dr. Gray is assisting in investigating, you have Mallory trying to cope with the whole time travel thing and fit in, and adapt to a whole new body – and it is a body that comes with a past, so there is unravelling to do around what Catriona was like before she got displaced from her body. There is the fact that Duncan Gray is actually the bastard son of the Gray family, and a person of mixed race heritage (implied to be white and Indian), who has taken over the family business and lives with his widowed sister. The rest of the Gray family staff also have their own past, and secrets that are hinted at.
Oh yeah. There also ends up being some references to Jack The Ripper (who yes, historically was not operating in Endingburn or in 1869, but the book ties it in. Again. There is a lot going on.) Did I enjoy most of what was happening? Hell yeah! It didn’t feel like a long read despite the sheer amount of information coming at you and it was hugely entertaining.
Despite her situation, Mallory retains her sense of humour and sarcasm, and it is fun to watch her slightly fish-out-of-water adventures as she adjusts to Victorian life. She also regularly gets checked on some of her assumptions about how Victorians lived. I liked the slow unravelling of the body of the woman she had jumped into, and I liked her dynamic with Dr. Gray and the way they are set up as a crime-solving duo.
Overall, it was a lot of fun! I’ve read this before (this was a re-read), and I think I liked it more this time around. I’m re-reading the second one now (because I’m preparing to read the third novel and the fourth in the series, which comes out in May), and I’m looking forward to reading more about Mallory and her adventures.