How sinister it is to relive your life backward. To see things you hadn’t at the time. To realize the horrible significance of events you had no idea were playing out around you.
Wrong Place, Wrong Time
by Gillian McAllister
Genre: Mystery/Thriller
About: Jen is carving a pumpkin for Halloween, her teenage son is walking home, and her husband is having a shower. They're a normal family, on a normal night. But then, through the window, she witnesses her son approach a stranger and stab him. It's an event that changes her whole world - shifts it literally backwards as she begins by waking up yesterday. She has to stop her son from becoming a murderer and somewhere in her past lies an answer, she's just not sure how far back she'll have to go to find it...
Thoughts
This is a really inventive mystery/thriller. Jen has all the clues that will allow her to work out why her son becomes a murderer, but they're all in her past, in her subconscious. Investigating means time-travelling. Every day that she goes backwards, she learns something new and the revelations build and build until it all makes sense. It's a singularly brilliant idea that is really well executed.
McAllister gives so much detail and real life to the events. The characters are interesting and layered - I loved seeing how Jen discovers these new things about the people she loves and of herself through these repeated days. Small meaningless moments become big life-changing ones as she reinterprets each action or comment that had slipped by her before. The entire book is like that detective moment when you zoom into a photograph and see a new detail that blows up the entire case.
The emotional connection that Jen has with her son, her husband and her father are all complicated but relatable and you really feel the knife slicing through her at each new discovery that forces her to examine what she thought she knew about these men in her life. Her love for them is all over the page and you're right there with her for the hurt as well as the joyful moments she gets to experience all over again.
But while I think this is highly original and really well-written, the overall book didn't grip me as much as I wanted it to. I think because we are going backwards rather than forwards. Everything Jen does, there's a feeling of it not mattering as the next wake-up will erase her actions. Although we are building towards something, it feels as if we're doing it in slow-motion because everything has a repetitive and lacking in consequences feel to it.
That said, I think these characters will stick with me because the writing made them so real.
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