Review: Wrong Place, Wrong Time

Wrong Place, Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow, just wow.

Jen is a middle-aged lawyer, married to Kelly (a self-employed painter and decorator) with an eighteen year old son Todd. On the Saturday just before Hallowe'en, on the night the clocks go back to mark the end of British Summer Time, Jen is waiting for Todd to return home from a party when she sees him accosted by an older man in the street. feeling deeply uneasy Jen and Kelly run into the street only to see Todd stab the man several times.

When Jen awakes the next morning, ready to go to the Plie station to get Todd a lawyer etc, she is astonished to find that Todd is at home. Neither Todd nor Kelly has any memory of the previous evening's events and it becomes obvious pretty quickly that Jen has woken up on the Saturday morning (again), before the stabbing, can she do anything to prevent her son possibly spending twenty five years in prison for murder?

With her lawyer's eye for detail Jen notices things as she relives the day that she never noticed before but each new clue is just a fragment - now she notices that her son has become thinner, less joyful than he was six months ago, is she a bad mother for not paying attention? Did something she failed to do lead to the stabbing?

Each day when Jen awakes she wakes a day earlier, then a week, going further back in time, discovering everything she thought she knew about her life and her marriage was a lie, but still no closer to why Todd killed the man.

I honestly spent several hours annoying my husband enormously yesterday by exclaiming at regular intervals over the latest twist in this book. What made it so enthralling was that I genuinely did not see half the twists coming, and yet they made total sense when they unfolded. I really wanted the Eastenders' theme tune to dum dum dum at the end of half the chapters as yet another truth was uncovered.

There are so many things I won't discuss because to do so might spoil the novel for the reader. Suffice it to say that I was not only 100% invested in the novel while I was reading it, but when it finished I was also fully onboard with the ending (unlike another book which was too clever for its own good which I read recently), as I sit here the whole thing ties together beautifully with no concerns about plot holes. This reminds me of that film The Usual Suspects (in a good way) as the reader is led one way, then another, in the search for the truth.

I have never read a book by Gillian McAllister before but if this is the calibre of plotting I will be looking up some of her previous books lickety-spit.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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