A Rip Through Time

Mallory Atkinson, a homicide detective, is in Edinburgh in May 2019 to sit with her dying grandmother. On an evening jog she hears a woman calling for help, follows the sound into an alley, and is strangled until she blacks out.

She wakes in 1869, inside the body of Catriona Mitchell, a housemaid who was strangled in the same spot exactly one hundred and fifty years earlier. Mallory has to absorb the shock fast and learn the daily routine of a servant in Victorian Scotland, working in the house of an undertaker.

Her employer, Dr. Gray, also acts as a medical examiner, and he has just taken a new case: a young man strangled in a way that echoes the attack on her. Mallory sees a chance to use her police training. Her only hope of returning to her own life is to catch the killer, and time may be short.

This is the first book in a series. It blends historical mystery with romance and a touch of fantasy, and it moves between a modern detective's habits and the limits of a nineteenth-century household. The dual dates of the opening give it a clear structure and a steady, puzzle-driven pace.