Rip Through Time · #1
A Rip Through Time
In this series debut from New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong, a modern-day homicide detective finds herself in Victorian Scotland—in an unfamiliar body—with a killer on the loose.
May 20, 2019: Homicide detective Mallory is in Edinburgh to be with her dying grandmother. While out on a jog one evening, Mallory hears a woman in distress. She’s drawn to an alley, where she is attacked and loses consciousness.
May 20, 1869: Housemaid Catriona Mitchell had been enjoying a half-day off, only to be discovered that night in a lane, where she’d been strangled and left for dead . . . exactly one-hundred-and-fifty years before Mallory was strangled in the same spot.
When Mallory wakes up in Catriona's body in 1869, she must put aside her shock and adjust quickly to the reality: life as a housemaid to an undertaker in Victorian Scotland. She soon discovers that her boss, Dr. Gray, also moonlights as a medical examiner and has just taken on an intriguing case, the strangulation of a young man, similar to the attack on herself. Her only hope is that catching the murderer can lead her back to her modern life . . . before it's too late.
Outlander meets The Alienist in Kelley Armstrong's A Rip Through Time, the first book in this utterly compelling series, mixing romance, mystery, and fantasy with thrilling results.
The series
In a city cloaked in gaslight and grit, where every shadow seems to whisper a secret, time tears open—and someone falls through.
Read full series description
Rip Through Time unspools its mystery with eerie elegance, blending historical suspense, slow-burn crime drama, and a speculative twist that sidesteps the usual time-travel tropes. The series begins not with a machine or a portal, but with a single, brutal attack that rips a 21st-century homicide detective out of her world and into the body of a woman in 1869 Edinburgh. What follows is not a frantic scramble to get home, but a calculated reckoning with the past—its brutality, its beauty, and its buried truths.
At the center of this atmospheric crime series is a woman out of time, forced to hide her identity while using modern instincts to navigate a world that barely tolerates her presence, let alone her intelligence. The city itself becomes a living character: dark alleys, bloodied cobblestones, and drawing rooms hiding crueler truths than any backstreet. As she becomes entangled in Victorian-era murder investigations, the clash of eras reveals not only how far we've come—but how much still lingers in the dark.
What makes this series stand apart isn’t just the clever interplay between historical detail and investigative grit—it’s the tension that hums beneath every interaction, the danger of being discovered not just as a stranger, but as a woman with knowledge no one can explain. It’s a story built on dualities: instinct vs. decorum, memory vs. illusion, and the kind of justice that doesn’t always follow the letter of the law.
For readers who crave crime fiction with a twist of the uncanny—and a setting that drips with gothic mood—this series offers a slow burn with a sharp edge, where every solved murder raises deeper questions and time itself might be the most dangerous thing of all.
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