★★★★☆
I love stories that play with the concept of time, and Gillian McAllister does this extremely well in Wrong Place Wrong Time.
After witnessing her normally kind teenage son, Todd, murder someone, Jen finds herself immersed in a time loop, where she desperately tries to understand and alter the disturbing event.
One of the greatest strengths of this book is how it plays with the concept of time. The story doesn’t fall into the same trap that many time loop novels fall into, which is evoking a Groundhog Day feeling through too much repetition. McAllister avoids this by not covering the same events too many times, and when she does, she keeps it brief.
I also enjoyed that the book moved backwardly in time at random intervals, which provided a fresh take on the well-explored concept of solving a mystery through time travel.
“Everything in parenthood feels so endless until it ceases.”
Gillian McAllister, Wrong Place Wrong Time
Another strength of the plot is that was told from the perspective of a loving mother questioning herself and everything she thought she knew about the men in her family. I appreciated the realizations Jen had as a daughter, mother, and wife throughout the course of the book.
Wrong Place Wrong Time is a good one for fans of time travel, genre bending thrillers, and lovers of Stuart Turton’s The Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. It kept me engaged, had lots of twists and bends, and had an unexpected yet satisfying ending.
