A modern-day homicide detective is working as an undertaker's assistant in Victorian Scotland when a serial poisoner attacks the men of Edinburgh and leaves their widows under suspicion.
Edinburgh, 1869: Modern-day homicide detective Mallory Atkinson is adjusting to her new life in Victorian Scotland. Her employers know she’s not housemaid Catriona Mitchell―even though Mallory is in Catriona’s body―and Mallory is now officially an undertaker’s assistant. Dr. Duncan Gray moonlights as a medical examiner, and their latest case hits close to home. Men are dropping dead from a powerful poison, and all signs point to the grieving widows… the latest of which is Gray’s oldest sister.
Poison is said to be a woman’s weapon, though Mallory has to wonder if it’s as simple as that. But she must tread carefully. Every move the household makes is being watched, and who knows where the investigation will lead.
New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong is known for her exquisite world building, and this latest series is no exception. The Poisoner's Ring brings the intricacies of Victorian Scotland alive as Mallory again searches for a 19th-century killer as well as a way home.
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.
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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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