Disturbing the Dead is the latest in a unique series with one foot in the 1860s and the other in the present day. The Rip Through Time crime novels are a genre-blending, atmospheric romp from New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong.
Victorian Scotland is becoming less strange to modern-day homicide detective Mallory Atkinson. Though inhabiting someone else’s body will always be unsettling, even if her employers know that she’s not actually housemaid Catriona Mitchell, ever since the night both of them were attacked in the same dark alley 150 years apart. Mallory likes her job as assistant to undertaker/medical examiner Dr. Duncan Gray, and is developing true friends―and feelings―in this century.
So, understanding the Victorian fascination with death, Mallory isn't that surprised when she and her friends are invited to a mummy unwrapping at the home of Sir Alastair Christie. When their host is missing when it comes time to unwrap the mummy, Gray and Mallory are asked to step in. And upon closer inspection, it’s not a mummy they’ve unwrapped, but a much more modern body.
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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