A Murder in Time

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Mystery / McElwain, Julie	4-week checkout	Due 05-10-2024

Beautiful and brilliant, Kendra Donovan is a rising star at the FBI. Yet her path to professional success hits a speed bump during a disastrous raid where half her team is murdered, a mole in the FBI is uncovered and she herself is severely wounded. As soon as she recovers, she goes rogue and travels to England to assassinate the man responsible for the deaths of her teammates. While fleeing from an unexpected assassin herself, Kendra escapes into a stairwell that promises sanctuary but when she stumbles out again, she is in the same place - Aldrich Castle - but in a different time: 1815, to be exact. Mistaken for a lady's maid hired to help with weekend guests, Kendra is forced to quickly adapt to the time period until she can figure out how she got there; and, more importantly, how to get back home. However, after the body of a young girl is found on the extensive grounds of the county estate, she starts to feel there's some purpose to her bizarre circumstances. Stripped of her twenty-first century tools, Kendra must use her wits alone in order to unmask a cunning madman. B̃ook jacket.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Lot of set up submitted by Mary Grace Kennedy on July 5, 2016, 6:57pm Good but there was a lot of set up that happens in the present.

Loved the Premise, Hated the Execution submitted by Meginator on August 24, 2020, 6:52pm Content Warning: This book includes scenes of torture, rape, and murder, and refers to incestuous relationships.
I really wanted to love this book, but it has enough major flaws that I could never fully sink into (and thus enjoy) the story. McElwain’s basic premise (sending a hyper-competent FBI agent into Jane Austen’s England) is killer, but Kendra Donovan proves difficult to root for because of a boorish contempt for contemporary social customs. Though I think the intent is to have Kendra challenge these mores through a modern feminist perspective, her inability to feign even grudging respect for her new contemporaries feels hollow and leads to anachronisms that make her ascent into the upper echelons of the gentry quite unbelievable. The book is also hampered by its prose, such as the author’s propensity to end every chapter on an over-the-top cliffhanger (of the “little did she know…” variety, occasionally verbatim) and an overwrought phonetic rendering of the working-class dialect that is painful to read and painfully frequent. The mystery itself is fine, though readers may be forgiven for being sick of stories featuring sadistic impulses against women (and particularly sex workers), but the book lacks editorial oversight and becomes a slog where it should be a lot of fun. I won’t be reading the sequels, despite an almost enticing cliffhanger conclusion.