‘Whatever you do, don’t trust Dickens.’ [loc. 696]
Ali Dawson is fifty years old, with fire-engine red hair and a son who's working as a special advisor to Isaac Templeton, a Tory MP. Ali herself works for the Cold Case Unit -- 'so cold they're frozen' -- which uses a top-secret time-travel device to investigate crimes.
Ali's first experience of time travel, in the first weeks of Covid lockdowns, went smoothly: she and her companion travelled back a single week, weren't visible to those around them, and returned to their present once they'd worked out that they had to stand exactly in the spot they'd arrived. Sent back to 1850s London to clear the name of Isaac Templeton's ancestor, things fall out rather differently.
There was a lot to like here: Ali's discoveries about Cain Templeton, presumed murderer, and the Collectors' Club of which he's a member; Jones (a.k.a Serafina Pellegrini), the brilliant Italian physicist who developed the time travel device; the subplot involving Finn; Ali's Siamese cat Terry (even though I hope the description of him as 'sleek teal' is a misprint). As long as I didn't think too hard about the time travel -- and the likelihood of it being used to solve crimes, rather than for military or criminal purposes -- my disbelief stayed manageable. And there's enough of a cliffhanger that I went straight on to the second in the series...
Read because: I'm a big fan of Griffiths' Ruth Galloway mysteries, and had bought this some time ago... then the second in the series showed up as a Daily Deal, and friends waxed enthusiastic about this first volume. After reading, it fitted nicely into a challenge prompt -- 'suspension of disbelief'!