Book Review: A Rip Through Time by Kelley Armstrong

A Rip Through Time by Kelley Armstrong
Length: 342 Pages
Genre: Historical Mystery
Rating: 4 out 5 Stars

Trigger Warnings in this book for Murder, Racism and Xenophobia, Some Gore and Blood

So, I've had a few Kelley Armstrong's books on my TBR for a while now, but when I read about her latest, featuring a Vancouver Detective who travels back in time to Victorian Edinburgh, I knew I had to snatch it up! I love anything Victorian, especially anything that features a crime and the medicine of the era (those Victorians were delightfully morbid), and I just thought it was a great idea to utilize a modern female protagonist thrust into those circumstances! Now, I think Armstrong can count me among her loyal legion of fans. And, not to sound like Mallory doing her best impression of Victorian speech, but I am demanding the sequel forthwith!

Mallory Atkinson is visiting Edinburgh, and not this time for a summer away, like in her youth, but to be with her dying grandmother. At night she jogs through the Old Town, desperate for some sort of relief that she knows won't come until the tragic happens, and her grandmother is lost to her forever. On one of these runs, she hears the screams of a woman coming from a dark alley, and, being a Detective back in Vancouver, she simply can't ignore it. Mallory tiptoes in, only to find...a strange sort of projection. That of a woman, dressed like she is from hundred of years ago. Then, Mallory is attacked from behind. As she struggles to free herself, the other woman is attacked too. It is the last thing she sees before she loses consciousness.

When Mallory comes to, she finds herself in a dark room, wearing a corset and dress and...not herself at all, but a young woman with blonde hair. A maid, it turns out, to the infamous Dr. Duncan Gray, an undertaker and medical examiner--a maid who just so happened to live 150 years prior. Now, living as Caitriona, Mallory struggles to make sense of what happened and to find a way back to 2019 and her grandmother. Through hard work, determination, and a fair bit of subterfuge, Mallory is able to impress her employer enough that he allows her to help him with his more bloody bits of work. When a murder occurs that has striking similarities to her attack in 2019, Mallory wonders if somehow her violent future has followed her into the past.

Mallory was a great heroine, smart and funny and compulsively readable, and I really enjoyed the secondary characters as well, from Dr. Gray (who I expect to become a love interest later in the series), to his sister, Isla, a chemist and woman ahead of her time, to Detective McCreadie and the other servants. The mystery is fun, and even has the killer creating an homage to Jack the Ripper, twenty years before his infamous crimes. It was obvious Armstrong did her research well, and I have to say I really enjoyed learning a bit about a Victorian funeral home and the burgeoning science of forensic examination, which makes most of the police and population suspicious of Dr. Grey in fear of his dark "predilections". If only they knew!

A historical mystery outside of the usual box and full of vivid characters and places, A Rip Through Time is an exciting start to a series that will keep you waiting, or begging, for more.