A Rip Through Time ((2022) - Kelley Armstrong

 

Back when I was eleven years old, the 1960 movie version of The Time Machine was my first real exposure to time travel stories. I knew I wanted more, but time travel movies don’t come along every day, so I reluctantly turned to the movie’s source material, the 1895 novel of the same name by H.G. Wells. That’s how a whole new fiction subgenre was introduced to me, and I’ve been a sucker for time travel novels ever since. Over the years, I’ve read some great ones, some mediocre ones, and some pretty bad ones.

Kelley Armstrong’s A Rip Through Time is one of the good ones.

For me, time travel novels come in two general types: thoughtful stories that explore the ethics and dangers of being able to change the future by changing the past vs. the, usually simpler but thrilling, adventures time travelers experience by going backward or forward in time.  Even though Armstrong's time traveler, Mallory Atkinson, is aware that her meddling in the past might change the future to some degree, A Rip Through Time falls more squarely in the second  category.

Mallory, a homicide detective with the Vancouver police department, is in Scotland to visit her dying grandmother for the last time when she crosses paths with a serial killer who tries to strangle her. The last thing she remembers, before waking up in a strangely antiquated room, is fighting for her life. Now she has to figure out why she’s trapped inside the body of a teenage housemaid in 1869 Edinburgh -  and why everyone seems to dislike her so much. And all the while, Mallory is desperately looking for a way back to her own world and time.

A Rip Through Time is a solid murder mystery in which Mallory and the local police work together to identify and stop whoever is strangling young women (Mallory believes that finding the killer is the key to her being able to return to her own time), but the real fun comes from watching her try to adapt to the period in which she’s trapped. Mallory’s police detective experience gives her crime scene insights and skills that 1869 policemen can only dream about, but she has to keep reminding herself that to them she is only a teenage housemaid - and a supposedly reformed thief, at that. On a lighter note, Mallory struggles not to use contemporary words and phrases that have completely different meanings in 1869 Scotland than they have in twenty-first century Canada - even though some in the household appreciate them enough to begin using the new words and phrases themselves.

A Rip Through Time has two sequels, The Poisoner’s Ring and The Music of Time that I hope to explore later. I’ve already read the first chapter of The Poisoner’s Ring and see that it takes up exactly where A Rip Through Time ends, so I decided to take a break from that world before reading on into the series. If you like more lighthearted (despite the numerous murders in this one) time travel fiction, I think you will enjoy A Rip Through Time.