Kelley Armstrong’s time travel series “A Rip Through Time” is clever, with a fascinating premise and much informative detail about life in Victorian Edinburgh through Armstrong’s deft melding of fact and fiction. And those are just a few of the many reasons to read this series. In this latest mystery in the series, “Disturbing the Dead,” main character Mallory is “treated” to the Victorian fad of all things Egyptian as she and Dr. Gray attend a mummy unwrapping party. Of course, being that Mallory is from the 21st century and has been thrown back to Victorian Edinburgh, she retains modern sensibilities and knows that unwrapping a mummy is a completely disrespectful manner in which to treat the remains of a human being. Many in that time also share that belief, but what the aristocracy want, they get. As is wont to happen in a murder mystery, the unwrapping party leads to a murder that Mallory and her friends will spend the novel solving.
In modern times, Mallory was a thirty-year-old Canadian detective. But when visiting Edinburgh to see her beloved grandmother before she died, Mallory was attacked while out on a jog. At the same time, 150 years in the past, Catriona, a housemaid in the home of Dr. Gray and his sister, was being attacked. Mallory wakes up in the body of young, attractive Catriona. It turns out that Catriona was a terrible person—truly awful— and it took time for Mallory to gain the confidence of most of Dr. Gray’s household. Now she has the confidence of Duncan Gray, his sister, and their friend, a police detective. And they all know her secret.
Dr. Gray is not your typical main character in that he is dark-skinned but also a member of London society. He is the result of an affair that his mother had with a man who then took it upon himself to raise Duncan with the two daughters from his marriage. So Isla, Duncan’s widowed sister, resides with him in their family home. Duncan is a doctor but really runs the family business, a funeral home. Isla is a chemist, an occupation which is very unusual for women in that era. Both are wealthy and progressive, and after they are convinced that Mallory is who she says she is, they include her in their activities, and Duncan includes her in his investigations into murders. Hugh McCreadie, Duncan’s best friend, also is in on Mallory’s secret as the three of them work together, with Isla’s occasional help, to solve various murders.
This novel has a twist regarding time travel that the previous two novels do not. This results in a definite shift in the narrative, and one that is really well done. It enables Mallory to shift her priorities and allows us to look forward to her spreading her roots in the past as she builds on her relationships and her “career” with the attendant difficulties that any woman might have experienced back then. As Armstrong herself suggests, it’s much better to have read the first two books in the series so that the background of the characters and their past interactions are fully detailed, and this novel can be better appreciated. The information about the underground market and the historical use of certain herbs in medicine is fascinating, as are the details regarding the women medical students and their struggle to be allowed to practice medicine.
The mystery is quite well done, with many red herrings, which term Mallory actually uses with her friends and then must explain. The time travel aspect and Mallory’s use of modern colloquialisms provide authenticity and a more than a bit of humor to the narrative. The plot and the clever, well-written dialogue serve to propel the mystery forward as we struggle to figure out who the perpetrator might be. As with Armstrong’s other series, these characters grow on us and become people we like and want to hear about. We want to know what comes next for them, so we wait for the next novel in the same manner as we might schedule lunch with a friend to catch up on news. We are hooked.
This review was first posted on Bookreporter.com.