Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister

Can you stop a murder after it’s already happened?
 

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 he’s walking toward a man, and he’s armed.
 

You can’t believe it when you see him do 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 . . .

Gillian McAllister’s Wrong Place Wrong Time is a perfectly fine book that was also unfortunately the Wrong book for me for a few reasons. A friend suggested this as a blind recommendation based on reviews and the synopsis involving reverse “time travel” where Jen Brotherhood gradually progresses backwards in time hoping to stop her song from murdering a seemingly random man named Joseph Jones. I was expecting a time traveling murder investigation that touched on familial drama but what I actually got was nearly all familial drama. That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, however the delivery was not to my taste as I like both my mystery and drama genres to be more intense and complex than what I read.

A middle-aged mother who’s overly concerned about how family is viewed is far from a character experience I empathize with, but moments when Jen reflects on how her past actions affected her family are thoughts that anyone can relate to. What Wrong Place Wrong Time does well is using the gradual reverse time-travel plot element as way for Jen to rediscover overlooked moments in her life while also providing a grounds hogs day setup where none of her actions seemingly stick. This clever plot device allows Jen to deviate from her usual actions which adds some interest to an otherwise slow-paced read. The book also switches back and forth between Jen’s experiences in reverse chronological order with a newly hired policeman named Ryan. While you know Jen’s life and where she is on her timeline, Ryan’s story progresses in the normal forward direction but with dates and context missing allowing for some unexpected plot twists. I thought the split narrative was handled well with both characters revealing different parts of the overall mystery without heavy overlap or repeated discoveries (a common drawback of split perspective narratives). The plot also has a tidy ending that resolves most major plot points, though it does come off as being too feel-good and comfy for me personally and have any explanation on the all to convenient jump forward.

Despite the interesting plot setup, unfortunately I found this book to be slow and tedious to read. Apart from the aforementioned murder that occurs on day zero, the rest of the mystery progresses at a snails pace and 90% of the content is all focused on Jen’s family life drama. That wouldn’t be a problem except that her frequent revelations about her husband Kelly and son Todd feel anything but world-shattering. Jen doesn’t have a single intuitive bone in her body and McAllister’s commentary on marriage relationships also doesn’t feel particularly insightful or thought-provoking. The overall drama feels shallow and tiring; I started enjoying this book a lot more when I started alternating between books and skimming, not very promising signs. This is also one of those character dramas where nearly every single problem could be solved by someone just having a spine and talking to each other honestly. There’s constant dishonesty thrown around which is fine, but when Jen discovers people have lied to her (usually for good reasons) it somehow rocks her world despite her doing the same thing? The character conflict and internal voice mostly comes off as being dull and juvenile.

The lack of depth is unfortunately also carries over to the core murder mystery. There’s a crime cartel connected to the murder mystery that involves pretty much everyone surrounding Jen’s life, but the mystery and investigation never got my attention. The murder mystery and resolution themselves were fine on paper, but the manner in which clues were revealed feels lackluster and anticlimactic. If you look closer at the investigation themselves, the details also start to get messy. Jen somehow fails to realize that various clues or documents are not in fact recent and are over a 20 yrs old (surely you can tell if paper or a poster that is decades old?), Ryan tries to barter with the taskforce and make an underhanded deal and they allow it just because it’s important to him, a courtroom case has an anonymous witness who is denied anonymity just so Jen can hear and recognize their voice; events are so implausible that just about any realism is thrown out the window for the sake of Jen’s convenient discovery.

The book also has a habit of hand-holding the reader throughout the entire book often explicitly explaining what clue Jen has just discovered, what the clue can mean, and then its implications moving forward. I hate to pigeonhole a book, but it really screams surface level simple-minded stereotypical book club read for mothers who are incapable of reading between the lines. There’s no subtlety or ambiguity anywhere and it honestly baffles me to read that some reviewers found the mystery too confusing or complex. The mystery itself is also quite formulaic and predictable, at the halfway mark I had a good idea of what caused the mysterious murder and how the book would end. Every time Jen felt her the entire world crumbling due to a new discovery, I was facepalming “no duh sherlock”.

Wrong Place Wrong Time was the wrong book for me but it’s competently written and plotted (if a bit lackluster and purely functional) as long as you go in expecting a story focused on family drama. The murder mystery and time travel merely serve as devices to steer the plot which is one of the weaker elements of this book. On the plus side, it’s a brain-off family drama story that’s accessible and easy to pick up for a casual read.