Book Review: Wrong Place Wrong Time

Spoilers!

If we could relive our lives backwards — become more of an observer than we typically are in the minutiae of day-to-day life — we would certainly experience our relationships, decisions, and the outcomes of our lives up to the present differently. Jen receives such an opportunity, only it results after the “hysterical strength” she discovers she possesses after her son, Todd, is implicated in a murder, i.e., her maternal protectiveness of her son was so strong, it pushed her into a time loop where she would go backwards until she understood the impetus behind Todd stabbing someone to death. This is the premise for Gillian McAllister’s wonderfully fun, intricately detailed and paced, 2022 thriller, Wrong Place Wrong Time.

Put another way, McAllister’s book is a love story told backward in order to be understood in the present, and it’s primarily a mother’s love story, that of Jen’s love for Todd. Through this experience of going backward, sometimes one day at a time, and as many as two decades toward the end, Jen grapples not only with Todd’s violent act in the present, but her internal insecurities at whether she was a good mother to Todd — the implication being that perhaps she’s to blame for what later transpired with Todd. By going backward, by understanding herself and her relationship to her son, she absolves herself. She wasn’t a perfect mother — she shouldn’t have laughed off his science-minded quirkiness, for example; she observed that “humor is its own form of repression” — but nobody is, and she was trying her best while also excelling in her career as a divorce lawyer and trying to be a good wife to her husband, Kelly.

Jen’s love for Kelly is the secondary love story in Wrong Place Wrong Time. They’ve been together for 20 years and raised Todd, but along the way, there are all kinds of little red flags about Kelly Jen missed because of the aforementioned way in which we only see red flags in hindsight. For example, that Todd only does business with cash, or that he has an annual weekend retreat with friends she’s never met. Or that he never goes on airplanes, and avoids cities. In general, his protectively private disposition (humor and banter as repression!). Turns out, he was an undercover cop investigating the very person, Joseph, Todd killed. He got out of the game to be with Jen. I figured something was going on with Kelly because his relationship with Todd seemed oddly icy. That’s because Todd was dating a girl who was the “niece” to Joseph (a kidnapped baby from 20 years prior), and to protect Todd, Kelly told him to stop dating her.

Anyhow, Jen ultimately figures all of this out, including her father’s own culpability in it all (he was helping Joseph in identifying houses to boost cars from), and does a “butterfly effect” sort of change for the future while in the past. She helps Kelly save the baby before she’s kidnapped. That means Kelly stays a cop as his real name of Ryan, and as fate would have it, in the present, Todd is still dating the girl (she just goes by her given name). But it also means Joseph was never caught and subsequently, Todd never killed him.

This was a delightful read because I’m a sucker for a fun romp through time, what it all means for the present action we witnessed, and the ruminations about life and love. It was sweet and tender how much Jen loved Todd, and her realization of how strong her love was, stronger even than her insecurities about having raised him. But Wrong Place Wrong Time was also a delightful read because McAllister expertly kept me guessing and wondering how everything was going to fit together. She had me bad-mouthing Kelly, rightly (from the perspective at that time from Jen), to understanding Kelly’s (aka Ryan’s) decision-making. Well-done, McAllister, well-done.

For Jen, when she lived her life backwards, she came to understand her life differently, including her relationships, but a force exists that is nonlinear, too, present (heh) across multiple versions of the events we experience: fate. However time rearranges itself with us as pieces on a chessboard, Jen was fated to be Todd’s mother, and Kelly’s (Ryan’s) wife. They were fated to be a family. At least in this outcome, Todd wouldn’t be dealing with a murder charge, thanks to a mother’s unwavering love.