Wrong Place, Wrong Time - Gillian McAllister

Reading Challenge Category: Free ARC from NetGalley

Official Blurb:

It's every parent's nightmare.
Your happy, funny, innocent son commits a terrible crime: murdering a complete stranger.
You don't know who. You don't know why. You only know your teenage boy is in custody and his future lost.
That night you fall asleep in despair. Until you wake . . .
. . . and it is yesterday.
Every morning you wake up a day earlier, another day before the murder. Another chance to stop it.
Somewhere in the past lie the answers, and you don't have a choice but to find them . . .

My Thoughts:

Wow, this was one crazy ride of a book!
I think the main point to make about this book is don’t go in with realistic expectations. If you have read the blurb, you will know Jen; the protagonist, does a spot of time travelling backwards through time to try and solve why her son murdered someone. So, in real life, we all know that this is completely implausible, but the book wouldn’t have been as amazing as it was without this element.
A lot of other reviewers have said that they found the story quite monotonous and that Jen repeated a lot of things day in day out. However, I disagree; I found that every day she woke up, something new was discovered, and the pieces started to come together slowly. I found the conception of the story as a whole very cleverly put together. The author must have had one hell of a storyboard to try and keep tabs on everything that was happening/happened/would happen. There is a sort of groundhog type element as she has to keep telling the same people the same thing that she has already told them. However, she isn’t stuck on the same day; she lives on a different one each time.
The thing that messed with my mind the most was that there were no consequences; whatever she said one day, no one would remember the next day as there was no tomorrow. The time travel aspect is kept quite simple because she changed nothing along the way; only the very final time in the past made a difference because each day she did live was actually in the future. So, when she woke again in the past, her previous day hadn’t happened yet. I usually get quite confused by time travel, but I found this story quite straightforward.
I wondered briefly why she didn’t just go back to the day that did matter and that would change everything; however, if she had, she wouldn’t have been equipped with all the knowledge she had pieced together to know what change was needed.
This was by far the best psych thriller that I have read this year so far, and it is well-deserving of the five stars that I am giving it.