Mallory is a 30 year old homicide detective in Vancouver, Canada, and while she’s visiting her nan in Edinburgh she is brutally attacked by a serial killer. Mallory survives, but when she wakes, she finds herself in 1869 in the body of a 19 year old housemaid called Catriona Mitchell. There seems to be a serial killer on the loose, and Catriona’s employer undertaker Dr Duncan Gray helps his friend police detective Hugh McCreadie to figure out what has happened because the police surgeon is pretty useless.
When Mallory/Catriona is attacked again she wonders whether her attacker followed her from 2019 in the same bizarre event that landed her here, in 1869. When she recognises the scene of the next murder as a copy of the first canonical murder of Jack the Ripper, she is certain that the serial killer from 2019 inhabits Catriona’s attacker. Now all she needs to do is find out who attacked Catriona. Unfortunately there are many people who could have because Catriona was a liar, a thief and abusive to others…
I’m not used to reading time travel stories other than Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, this one had me enthralled from the get-go. Mallory is a good protagonist, she’s inquisitive as she’s a police homicide detective and she manages to fly under the radar undetected for a little while. Because her character is so different to the delinquent Catriona, people do suspect something is up although the “amnesia” is easily attributed to the knock on the head she received during her attack.
I’m definitely interested in reading the rest of the series!
Read for the ShelfReflection Reading Challenge 2024.
Prompt 1: A book with time travel.
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
