Wrong Place Wrong Time – Gillian McAllister

Late October. After midnight. You’re waiting up for your seventeen-year-old son. He’s late. As you watch from the window, he emerges, and you realize he isn’t alone: he’s walking toward a man, and he’s armed.

You can’t believe it when you see him do it: your funny, happy teenage son, he kills a stranger, right there on the street outside your house. You don’t know who. You don’t know why. You only know your son is now in custody. His future shattered.

That night you fall asleep in despair. All is lost. Until you wake . . .

. . . and it is yesterday.

And then you wake again . . .

. . . and it is the day before yesterday.

Every morning you wake up a day earlier, another day before the murder. With another chance to stop it. Somewhere in the past lies an answer. The trigger for this crime—and you don’t have a choice but to find it . . .

BOOK REVIEW

WRONG PLACE, WRONG TIME really surprised me. I’m always looking for a time travel book but more often the sci-fi books that I connect with have a thriller vibe to them and this book checked both of those boxes. It starts out with action, which I always love, not leaving the reader hanging around too long before the plot kicks off and the story gets interesting. The book begins on “Day 0” where the main character’s son murders a man and starts working its way backward as Jen ends up being sent back in time every day, having to figure out why she’s being transported back in time and how she can help her son.

The book unravels backwards, giving the reader clues to the bigger picture along the way. It was SO well done and incredibly interesting, with each day in the past that Jen experiences allowing her to do something different to gather more clues. Then along the way, she also wonders (as did I) what would happen at the end of the book. She’s already back in time so technically the murder hasn’t taken place yet. How do her actions change the course of the events of Day 0? *Do* her actions change the course of anything since technically she’s in the past? How does she get back to the present, or will she? Does she need to sacrifice something for her son, pay more attention, meet different people? Nothing was revealed too early and smaller parts that may have seemed slightly confusing in the beginning were written that way for a reason with the pieces falling into place later on, but I trusted the process and I was rewarded for that patience.

Jen was an enjoyable main character. She was a hard-working mother who was good at her job as a divorce lawyer and maybe didn’t spend enough time with her only son Todd, as she begins to explain along the way. It was nice to see her with some flaws but nothing that would turn me off to her character, and I also got to see her work on those flaws and contemplate things she would (and did) change by having this second chance to relive some of these days.

We also got a second POV of rookie cop Ryan who was introduced a few chapters in. He was an incredibly interesting addition to the story because throughout his first chapters, he’s seemingly only loosely connected and I immediately began trying to figure out what role he would play in the story, as surely with his own POV, there was more to be revealed there. Would his chapters go forwards in time, or would he experience the same thing as Jen and start working backwards?

Then there are the two people closest to Jen — her husband Kelly and her son Todd, who she’s currently trying to save. Everyone has secrets and Jen has to figure out what they are and how they connect.

The book is a sci-fi thriller but the thriller part is more crime/detective, which I wasn’t connected to at first but the more I got to know about it, the more interesting it was. The way things all came back together in the end was excellent, and I really loved the ending overall. We find out Jen’s fate, of course, and what everything meant and how it connected. There were plenty of surprises and twists, and even the little afterword was interesting and made the book feel all the more real. There’s also potential there for more to be done, so I don’t know if anything will happen with that or if it’s just a little nugget to keep us thinking after the book is over.

This was an absolute hit for me and one I’ll be recommending! I gave it 4.5 stars instead of 5 simply because it took me just a touch to get pulled into the crime side of the story, but that was strictly because of personal preference.