C
Genre: Historical: European, Mystery/Thriller, Time Travel
Theme: Mistaken/False Identity, Time Travel
Archetype: Cop/Sheriff
A Murder in Time is a book I’ve mentioned a couple times on the site. It was also recently on sale! The premise of an FBI agent heroine traveling back in time to 1815 London and getting involved in a serial murder case was too tempting for me to resist. At its heart, this story has a great mystery, but too many unnecessary or ill-fitting details slowed the book to a slog. I just wanted more murder and crime solving.
Before we begin the plot description – trigger warning for murder and violence against women.
Agent Kendra Donovan is a criminal profiler for the FBI. She’s also a eugenics baby (more on that later). After a mission that went horribly wrong, culminating in the deaths of her team, Kendra finds herself thirsty for revenge. The man responsible, Sir Jeremy Green, has turned into an informant and therefore won’t be prosecuted. Kendra is understandably angry and while on medical leave decides to mete out her own brand of justice.
Taking several precautions to keep the FBI off her tail, she travels to England where Sir Green is hosting an event in Aldridge Castle. There she plans to lure him into a room and poison him, but things don’t go as planned: someone else winds up shooting Sir Green. As Kendra tries to escape through a secret passageway in the castle, she is sent back in time. How this happens and why is something we don’t really figure out in this book. A Murder in Time is more about Kendra trying to navigate the early nineteenth century. I’m hoping there will be more of her figuring out how to go home in the next book.
Now stuck in 1815, Kendra is discovered in that same castle by the Duke of Aldridge and his nephew, Alec. The Duke is intrigued; he’s a man of science and Kendra also reminds him of his long lost daughter. However, Alec thinks she’s either a thief or has gone mad. Thinking on her feet, Kendra insists she’s a maid from America, sent to serve the castle during a house party thrown by the Duke’s sister, Lady Atwood.
And then women start dying. Given Kendra’s knowledge as a criminal profiler, she inserts herself into the investigation, which of course stuns all the men in attendance at the castle (cue much resigned eye rolling on my part), given the gender politics and sexism of 1815.
Despite the men being big babies about protecting the women’s sensibilities, all the women in A Murder in Time were strong and awesome in their own ways. Every female character was much smarter and more aware of what was really happening than their male counterparts. I cackled any time one of the female characters got one over on a stuffy dude through snark or smarts or even passive aggressive manner-minding.
Strength comes in many forms and it was great to see rather positive depictions of so many women. There’s Rose, a “tweeny,” which is more like a maid in training. She’s kind and earnest and helps Kendra settle in. There’s Rebecca, who is part of the upperclass and who survived smallpox. She’s progressive and is interested in helping to solve the string of murders. Unfortunately, I found them more interesting than Kendra.
As a heroine, Kendra was hard to relate to. As I mentioned, she’s described in the book as a eugenics baby. Her parents are scientists who treated her more as an experiment than a child. They wanted to breed their most desirable traits in their daughter and it worked. She went to college at an early age and earned a spot as an FBI profiler at the age of 23. However, the eugenics aspect of her backstory seemed ill-fitting me. It was under explored given how huge a concept that is generally, and how integral to her identity it seemed to be. Kendra frequently feels like a “freak” given her eugenics background and has trouble fitting in, but this could have been accomplished narratively without adding the eugenics element. She’s a woman in what is portrayed as a male-dominated field. Isn’t that enough of a reason to feel out of place?
However, it does set up a parallel that she feels those same feelings in 1815 England because she’s a woman who does things women in that era don’t do. She speaks her mind, she curses, she has no knowledge of etiquette appropriate for her station, and she has an unconventional hairstyle for the time. (It’s an angled bob, by the way.)
But the eugenics aspect felt more like shorthand instead of a plausible explanation for feeling different in the present day and in the past. Because she’s super smart, Kendra seems to be good at everything. She knows a variety of languages and can recall the most random facts about things like Ming vases and then an author’s lifespan. She lacked the empathy I want in a character and came across more like a computer, going through procedures and regurgitating facts.
One more bothersome element of the book was that the POV seems to change mid-paragraph. For example, Kendra would be introduced to a doctor and then we’d get the doctor’s internal opinion on Kendra. It was confusing to figure out who was supposed to be thinking what.
Negatives aside, I really enjoyed the mystery of this one. I’m the kind of annoying reader and television/movie watcher who tries to guess what’s going to happen before it does. I feel like such a badass when I know the twist before it’s revealed. A Murder in Time had me guessing the whole way through and I frequently waffled on the identity of the murderer. I also loved seeing Kendra try to use modern crime solving techniques without the aid of technology. I wasn’t sure how this book would end and whether Kendra would make it back to the present day.
Overall, I was happy with the conclusion, save for one, mind-boggling detail:
Kendra reminds him that she’s hoping to leave 1815 for good in a few days, so maybe he should slow his roll. He and the duke know about Kendra’s time-traveling, but Alec hopes he can convince her to stay permanently.
What. No.
While I loved the back and forth Kendra and Alec had in the book, their romance went from zero to “I love you” way too quickly. It would have made much for sense for the romance to continue on its slow and reasonable pace in the next book, considering Alec is accused of murder in the next one. Why rush to establish those feelings? I didn’t get it and I didn’t like it.
Despite my disappointment with how things were wrapped up and with Kendra’s characterization, the cleverness of the mystery motivates me to continue with the series. If you want a good mystery with a time travel twist and a serial killer disguised amongst gentry, A Murder in Time is great. But be prepared for some frustrating elements that may take you out of the story. I recommend taking frequent breaks while reading, lest your frustration boil over.
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This was a C book for me, too. While the premise was fun, I thought it was poorly handled. Kendra’s language bothered me the most. She’s brilliant but she doesn’t stop to think that, maybe, using 21st century science/police (???) terms to describe the murder, the body, and the murderer could be a problem in the Regency? At one points she takes pains to explain “unsub.” It was strange and clunky.
I’d bet the eugenics plot will be explored in future books.
“Taking several precautions to keep the FBI off her tail, she travels to England where Sir Green is hosting an event in Aldridge Castle. There she plans to lure him into a room and poison him, but things don’t go as planned: someone else winds up shooting Sir Green.”
— I played way too many family games of Cluedo over Christmas. I read that and immediately thought “Sir Green, in the library, with the revolver.”
This does sound interesting, actually, although I think the romance plot line would bug me.
As a Brit, the mangling of titles always bugs the crap out of me. So, for example, if you’re talking to or about Sir Jeremy Green then you call him ‘Sir Jeremy’.
It’s such a trivial thing in some ways (and even a casual Wikipedia search finds it immediately), but getting this wrong always makes me immediately wonder what else the author hasn’t bothered to research
This premise sounded fantastically exciting to me, but spending the length of the Amazon preview in Kendra’s head was already too much for me.
It was a while ago, so I can’t speak to research inaccuracies (I remember one or two things pinging my suspiciometer, but would have to check to see what precisely they were); more than anything it was the narrative style and Kendra’s almost pompous inner voice that made it difficult for me to engage.
In a weird way she almost felt like Mulder and Scully squished together, but that might also be because I’ve recently been on an X-Files kick…
Agreeing totally with your review here. The serial killer plot was super interesting but I just couldn’t buy how she managed to get these 18th century dudes to go along with her methods. And yeah the ending bugged me too. That being said I may find myself reading the next one just to see where she takes the story next
@Jackie, as an American, that annoys the daylights out of me, too. I’ll usually DNF books that do it. (I put up with it in the October Daye books where Toby is referred to as Sir Daye because that’s Faerie, not the UK, but it bothers me every time it happens. LOL.)
This book sounded fascinating; however, I put it down after only a few chapters. I may give it another try sometime.
There definitely are some other weird details, like using miles over kilometers. If it was Kendra’s POV, it makes sense. However, sometimes I couldn’t tell whose POV it was!
Maybe my expectations were too high, but I found the book phenomenally disappointing. The premise was irresistible but the writing was just poor. It was clunky, full of unnecessary exposition – except for all the things that made no sense and could have used a little explanation. The pacing was weird, the characters motivations tended to be be plot driven and unbelievable, and the characters themselves off putting (except a few minor characters). I fully expected the past to turn out to be a fever dream it was so unlikely and inaccurate.
I won’t be reading more of the series, which I think means I’d grade it worse than a C? I am definitely biased by my disappointment though!
Amanda, in 1815 it would have been ‘miles’ in England. Britain wasn’t metric back then.
@Jane: I had no idea, haha!
This book was a DNF for me. I was excited about it because of the premise, but the writing in the first few chapters was so clunky I couldn’t keep going. The world-building felt like it was done by an author who’s seen a lot of shows and movies about the FBI instead of doing actual research, and I didn’t feel like Kendra’s actions matched her reputation as an intelligent woman.
It has a ton of 5-star reviews on Amazon, so I definitely seem to be in the minority.
Britain still isn’t metric when it comes to distances on roads, we have eg Manchester 33 on signs on the motorways, and that means 33 miles.
I really wanted to love this novel – it had all the elements I could want in escapist fiction – and I agree it was great to read such highly capable female characters within that context. Unfortunately though I did not take your recommended frequent breaks, and so my frustration with prose quality and character development/inconsistencies did boil over. I hope these issues are ironed out in the next instalment.