Wrong Place Wrong Time
Hi Book-lover friends! I hope you are enjoying these darker October days. I've just finished a book that will help you to get your pumpkin carved, before it's too late! 🎃
Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister begins just after midnight on October 30th, the night that clocks are due to be set back an hour. English divorce lawyer Jen and her Welsh decorator husband Kelly, see their son Todd stab a man who had been running towards him, right outside of their house, just as the clocks turned back. They deal with the bloody fallout, and after they leave Todd at the police station, they go home to sleep. When Jen wakes up the next morning, Todd emerges from his bedroom as if nothing has ever happened, and Jen comes to understand that it is the day before the stabbing. As the story progresses, Jen keeps moving back in time, sometimes consecutively, sometimes in great leaps.
"How sinister it is to relive your life backward. To see things you hadn't at the time. To realize the horrible significance of events you had no idea were playing out around you."
Jen gets in touch with Andy, a physicist friend of her business partner's, who had written his PhD dissertation on the possibility of getting stuck in a time loop. Andy helps Jen to see that each day she lands in is somehow related to the crime, and believes that she might be moving backward in order to prevent it from happening. As she travels backwards, Jen realizes that there are many things she would like to do over, especially being a better, more involved mother, and, most disturbingly, she comes to realize that her husband is not the man he has been pretending to be.
Wrong Place Wrong Time is the perfect story for eerie late October nights, especially for the reader who enjoys books involving time travel such as This Time Tomorrow, Fifty in Reverse, Before the Coffee Gets Cold, and The Midnight Library. As with these other titles, Wrong Place Wrong Time reads more like a novel, not science fiction, with a great deal of character and plot development, and it has an especially satisfying ending, which, in my humble opinion, is always preferable!
What are you reading now? If you have already read Wrong Place Wrong Time, did you like the book? I am currently enjoying reading Now is Not the Time to Panic, by Kevin Wilson, listening to The Real Mrs. Tobias, by Sally Koslow, and am about to start reading Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan, which similarly opens with a mother whose son is involved in a murder.
Happy Halloween to all, and keep in touch in the comments below! Boo-kishly 👻 yours, Gaili Schoen
