Wrong Place Wrong Time

Gillian McCallister’s Wrong Place, Wrong Time (2022) is a murder mystery thriller and time travel adventure. It follows Jen Brotherhood, a successful lawyer living in Liverpool, as she tries to prevent her son, Todd, from committing a murder. She finds herself in a time spiral the morning after her son is arrested. Moving backward in time, she finds clues that explain her son’s actions.

This guide uses the 2022 HarperCollins hardcover edition.

Content Warning: The source material includes violence, murder, and suicide.  

Plot Summary

It is nearly midnight on October 30, 2022. Divorce lawyer Jen Brotherhood waits for her 18-year-old son Todd to get home from a date with his new girlfriend Clio. As she watches him arrive from an upstairs window, a man accosts him in the driveway. Before she can do anything, Todd knifes the stranger.

Todd is taken into police custody. Jen and her husband, Kelly, a self-employed contractor, return home until morning. When Jen awakens, she finds out it is still October 30. Her son has not been arrested. There has been no murder. She decides the killing must have been a dream.

But when Jen awakes the next day, it is now two days before the murder. Jen understands something strange is happening to her. She is moving backward in time and reliving her past, and tries to explain this to her son and husband. She decides she has been given a chance to find out why Todd killed that stranger and perhaps prevent it.

With the help of a physics professor, Jen learns about the possibility of time loops, how a person driven by their subconscious can spiral back into time. Each day she awakens to a different significant day. She sees clues that she missed the first time and chides herself for being addicted to work and uninvolved with her family. She visits the office where Todd has been working, where he met Clio. Through diligent investigating, she discovers the offices are a front for a criminal organization that steals luxury cars and distributes street drugs. The man Todd knifes is Joseph Jones, the organization’s ringleader.

Chapters about a rookie undercover cop named Ryan Hiles are interspersed throughout the novel. Set in 2002, they chronicle Ryan’s desire to help others, his disenchantment with routine police work, and his decision to go undercover to infiltrate the same crime ring that Jen uncovers. He creates a persona and chooses the name Kelly after his older brother, who committed a few petty crimes and had hung himself. Ryan boosts cars to establish his credibility until he finds out that a stolen car had a baby in the backseat.

As Jen heads further back in time, she finds evidence that her husband may be living a double life. Initially, she suspects he is having an affair. Then she discovers a poster among her husband’s things of a missing baby named Eve Green dated more than 20 years earlier. She realizes that her husband is, in fact, a retired police officer named Ryan Hiles. He left the force 20 years earlier. He was just months into undercover work and had agreed to testify to the identity of the man who ran the crime ring. This was shortly after he and Jen had met at her father’s law firm where she was interning. Jen comes to understand that Jones, the man her son knifed, had just been released after serving 20 years because of Kelly’s testimony.

Jen is devastated to find out that her late father, a lawyer, had been involved with the crime ring. For years he had provided names of properties where the gang could boost luxury cars. She is also devastated that her husband was in fact an undercover cop investigating her father’s involvement in organized crime.

In one of her time leaps, Jen alerts the cops about the car theft involving baby Eve. She prevents the kidnapping, which allows the crime boss to stay out of prison, which negates Todd’s murdering of him. The crime boss never went to prison and therefore never returned to settle the score with the man who put him away.

When Jen leaps back to the present, she understands that her husband’s elaborate charade had been for her, to protect her and their son. In the new present, Kelly is Ryan Hiles and is still a cop. Her son Todd has found his way to his first love, a beautiful girl named Eve Green.