Cultural Dessert

‘Wrong Place Wrong Time’ by Gillian McAllister

15 July 2022

When we saw the thriller writer Erin Kelly at the Ampthill Literary Festival earlier this year (reviewed here in April 2022), one of the authors she recommended was Gillian McAllister. I have just finished reading ‘Wrong Place Wrong Time’ - the new novel by Gillian McAllister (as an unabridged audio book, narrated by Lesley Sharp) and I loved it. This is a crime thriller with a twist. Jen - a successful Liverpool solicitor - witnesses an horrific murder directly outside her house. This traumatic experience has a profound effect on her and when she wakes up the following morning she discovers that it is actually the previous morning and the murder hasn’t happened yet. Armed with her knowledge of the future could she prevent the crime from being committed? The device of travelling back in time to relive the same events in order to try to change their outcome reminded of ‘The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle’ by Stuart Turton (reviewed here in April 2019) and the Netflix series ‘Russian Doll’. But ‘Wrong Place Wrong Time’ is less concerned with the science fiction of time travel and more an exercise in searching your own memory for clues that were there all the time but that you hadn’t noticed before. There were multiple twists in Jen’s story, almost all of which caught me completely by surprise. But the really clever thing about Gillian McAllister’s novel is how it manages to replicate Jen’s experience for the reader, showing you that you had read the clues to each unexpected twist earlier in the book without noticing their significance. I had no idea where the plot was taking me and this made it a very enjoyable and ultimately satisfying read.

Labels: Books

posted by Robin Simpson @ 1:05 pm