With its brooding hero, numerous ghosts, a charming-yet-haunted old house, multiple historical murder mysteries, and the beautiful but dangerous moors of England, A Stitch in Time was a fun and engaging book to start out my spooky season reading. Was it somewhat derivative and convoluted? Yes. But it was also delightfully atmospheric and endearingly quirky in its delivery of a number of gothic and paranormal romance tropes. It sort of reminded me of Crimson Peak if you added time travel and dialed back the more disturbing elements by about 50%.

The heroine is 38-year-old Canadian professor Bronwyn Dale (what a name!) who has just inherited her aunt’s home in the English moors, Thorne Manor. Bronwyn spent time at Thorne Manor as a child and teen before a family tragedy occurred there. She used to time-travel 200 years in the past via her Thorne Manor bedroom and hang out with the heir to the manor from that time, William Thorne. William was her first love, but as an adult, she’s become convinced both that the ghosts she used to see at the manor and the time travel and the hanging out with William Thorne were all elaborate hallucinations. She returns to the manor for the summer with the intention of fixing it up and laying any lingering bad vibes to rest.

Then she starts both seeing ghosts and time travelling to William again, and must grapple with the fact that it was all real the whole time. In between navigating the vagaries of time travel dating, she has to try to appease some rather aggressive ghosts who want her to solve the mystery of their murders. (Yes, there are multiple ghosts and multiple murders!) Also, she has to fix up the house and take care of a stray kitten.

There is definitely a lot going on plot-wise, but I never got lost. If anything, I almost felt like Bronwyn’s narrative voice was overly explanatory about everything that was going on. It sometimes broke up the flow of the story. This occasional sense of over-chattiness is NOT helped by the fact that the entire book is delivered in first person present tense (which I know is a dealbreaker for some readers).

While there are lots of mystery and creepy elements to this story, this is fundamentally a time travel romance. This is not a trope I usually enjoy, but I did like the romance between Bronwyn and William. It was surprisingly low-angst given William’s overall gothic hero vibes—much more sweet and shy than tortured and agonizing. After quickly getting over some initial conflict about why Bronwyn stopped visiting the past, the only real obstacle between them was figuring out time-travel related logistics. Their relationship seemed more or less a settled matter by about ⅔ of the way into the book, and even late stage mystery-related conflict didn’t really shake that impression for me. Unfortunately, some of the steamier scenes came across as more awkward than erotic (including one particularly anatomically unlikely scene that involves penetration somehow being initiated while William is…spinning Bronwyn around?). However, the emotional beats resonated and I appreciated the way that these were two characters who were so clearly invested in each other’s happiness.

William is basically an introverted, sensitive, feminist modern man in historical cosplay. He is incredibly blasé about things like time travel, cell phones and technology, streaming music services, and modern social mores. Since this book also has time travel and ghosts, I did not really have an issue with this. But I do think if plausibility is an issue for you as a reader you may want to skip this one as basically everything about the plot requires you to just ~roll with it.~

Sometimes I found myself a little bit befuddled by the fact that there is not much internal consistency in the rules surrounding the ghosts or the time travel in this book. But overall I just allowed myself to be merrily swept along by the many spooky and macabre elements. There are jump scares, hidden bodies, and various different kinds of apparitions both helpful and malevolent. There is a particularly spine-tingling scene where a ghost appears while Bronwyn is in the bathtub. The mystery, while not especially complex, had enough red herrings to keep me interested.

While I liked the romance and I thought the plot was fun if not especially tight or internally coherent, what I enjoyed most about this book was its sense of atmosphere. The book does an excellent job evoking a variety of different vibes, including cozy, curl-up-by-the-fire-with-tea feelings, a sense of sweeping and melancholic beauty, and haunting tragedy. Here’s one particularly cozy interlude:

I take my evening tea and novel and kitten into the sitting room, where I open the front window, snuggle onto the sofa and tuck a wool blanket around me. I don’t read right away, though–I just relax and inhale the perfume of dew-laden heather as I cuddle under the warm blanket, nibble my chocolate biscuits and sip my tea. Does it remind me of summers I curled up in a chair in this very room, munching biscuits and sipping milky tea with Aunt Judith? Or days wandering the moor with Uncle Stan? Of course it does.

As is common in gothic-tinged works, the house and surrounding environs feel like a distinct character and I felt this aspect of the book was unusually well-rendered. As she approaches the house for the first time since inheriting it, Bronwyn thinks:

The house appears abandoned. It is, in its way. Aunt Judith rarely visited after Uncle Stan died here all those years ago. Yet from the foot of the hill, Thorne Manor has always looked abandoned. A foreboding stone slab of a house, isolated and desolate, surrounded by an endless expanse of empty moor.

This is the kind of imagery I want to describe a haunted gothic estate!

For the most part, this book provides a perfectly serviceable if not mind-blowing rendition of a number of gothic and time travel romance tropes. With that said, there are a couple of innovative things I do specifically want to call out. First, I think this book deserves a huge shout out for the fact that the heroine and hero are both 38 years old. Bronwyn is a widow and she has had a full adult life before the onset of her rekindled romance with William. Second, I also want to shout out that one of the supporting characters, the grumpy Thorne Manor caretaker Del, is a trans man, and I felt his inclusion was handled in a deft and not otherizing way.

While the narration was a little clunky at times and I don’t think the paranormal aspects of the plot hold up terribly well under examination, this book was fun for some early Halloween season reading. If you like time travel or gothic romance I think there’s a lot to like here. However, gothic romance fans should note that romance itself is fairly sweet and light and the gothic elements are more embedded in the various ghost and murder subplots. If neither of those genres are of interest for you, this book probably won’t change your mind.