A Rip Through Time

Mallory, a Canadian homicide detective from Vancouver, is visiting Edinburgh when a small mishap in a cafe goes badly wrong. She spills coffee on a man standing in line, and his hostile reaction leaves her badly shaken.

That night she goes out for a run, pushing hard as though something were chasing her. In the distance she hears a woman scream for help and, without stopping to think, runs into an alley crowded with boxes and garbage cans. A beaten woman in an old-fashioned dress lies on the ground. Mallory's instincts tell her to turn around, and when she does, the man from the cafe is standing there. He tries to strangle her with a rope, and she fights for her life.

During the struggle she sees two glowing figures in the alley. One is a young woman in a blue dress with a somber gaze and her hands wrapped around her own throat, who then vanishes. Mallory keeps fighting, but her strength is failing, and she closes her eyes.

This is the first novel in Kelley Armstrong's Rip Through Time series. As the title suggests, the attack sends Mallory into the Victorian past, where she wakes in 1869 Edinburgh in the body of another woman.