A Rip Through Time

In too many historical mysteries and science fiction novels, other times and places are strangely devoid of anyone who’s not straight and white. Not so the science-fiction-tinged Victorian era envisaged by prolific author Armstrong (A Stitch in Time series). The book opens in 2019, with Vancouver, BC detective Mallory Atkinson visiting Scotland to tend to her dying grandmother. Hearing a woman cry out for help in an alley, she intervenes in what turns out to be an apparition of an attack, only to enter the vision and wake up in 1869 as a teenage housemaid. She lands in the Edinburgh home of undertaker Dr. Duncan Gray, who’s using his trade to become an early forensic scientist. Gray and his widowed sister, Isla, are somewhat cut off from society, Gray because he was born from an affair his father had with a woman whom the family believed to be Indian—it was all kept hush-hush—and his sister because she’s a Victorian woman of means, expected to stay home. Readers will enjoy watching Mallory as she struggles to fit in and help Gray find the man—a serial killer, though that term is unknown—who’s posing bodies in sensational ways around the city. For those who enjoy Julie McElwain’s Kendra Donovan series, in which an FBI agent time travels to 1816 London.