By Kelley Armstrong
Published May 2022
346 Pages
In 2019, Canadian homicide detective Mallory Atkinson is in Edinburgh for a final visit with her dying grandmother. While out for a jog, she hears a woman in distress and investigates, only to be attacked herself. She comes to in an unfamiliar house and in the body of a nineteen-year-old maid named Catriona. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s 1869.
While trying to learn her role as a maid and not give herself away as an imposter, Mallory puts her professional skills to work trying to determine how she got there. It turns out she was strangled in the same spot that Catriona was attacked and left for dead 150 years earlier. As she searches for a way to return home, Mallory gets involved in the investigation of another serial strangler hunting in Victorian Scotland. A killer that is eerily similar to the one who attacked her in the future.
I’ll admit, when I first picked this book up, I thought it was the third installment in Armstrong’s A Stitch in Time series. Both are set in Victorian times and both involve time travel. Then I realized this is a brand new series and I had mixed emotions. Armstrong is nothing if not a prolific author and sometimes when an author is publishing two or more books a year, the writing can feel rushed. I’m happy to report I didn’t get that sense with this novel.
While not terribly deep, it was a fun read and I love Victorian fiction. And if Mallory was going to have the bad luck of falling through a crack in time, she landed in a nearly perfect household. The owner is a funeral director who is interested in the budding field of forensics science (which was really quite interesting). Plus, he’s not terribly observant of his staff, allowing Mallory’s blunders and slips of the tongue to go largely unnoticed. However, the rest of the household is not so oblivious. As soon as the owner’s sister, Isla, arrives home, Mallory finds out that Catriona has stolen from her mistress and it’s time to pay the price. I don’t want to throw out any spoilers, but after Mallory has to confess her secret to Isla, their conversations became my favorite parts of the book.
So, even though this wasn’t the novel I expected it to be and it was, in all honesty, almost a blend of her other time travel series and her Rockton detective series, it was still a great read. I’ll be waiting for the next one, since it’s very obvious there will be a next one. In the meantime, I have the next A Stitch in Time novel to look forward to in October.
I rated this novel 4 stars. ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Until next time, thank you for visiting.
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