Outlander meets Criminal Minds

When brilliant FBI agent Kendra Donovan stumbles back in time and finds herself in a 19th century English castle under threat from a vicious serial killer, she scrambles to solve the case before it takes her life—200 years before she was even born.

This was certainly not a book to take seriously – think of a wallpaper historical novel with a modern day heroine who just doesn’t fit in, nor does she seem to care to.  Kendra Donovan is supposedly a child prodigy; she went to college at 14, and became a brilliant profiler with the FBI after that.  She’s a typical loner, and swears like a sailor in what seems like an attempt to appear like one of the guys.  After a mission leaves her injured, she vows to hunt down the man she feels is responsible for the failed raid and heads to England without letting her superiors know what she is doing.  She infiltrates the estate by joining a crew of workers dressed in period costumes, and ends up in a concealed stairwell.  After a weird turn of events that leaves her dazed, she emerges from the stairwell to find herself in 1815.

It takes awhile for Kendra to wrap her head around the fact that she’s stranded in a different time period – the first person she meets is the Duke of Aldridge, who is strangely bemused at finding a strange woman in his study.  She’s wearing a lady’s maid outfit, which would place her well below the Duke’s social strata but he chats with her as if she was on his level.  His nephew Alec, Earl of Sutcliffe, however, is immediately hostile and suspicious of her.  Her language and mannerisms clearly indicate that Kendra is not the usual lady’s maid but she is assigned that duty – and she fails miserably at it by swearing at the women and telling them to shut up.  This gets her demoted to kitchen duty, and during one of the outside nuncheons she is serving at a body is discovered in the lake.  Immediately her FBI training kicks in and she barges into the scene, ordering the men to secure the perimeter and muttering about the “unsub”.  Naturally, this is baffling to them, but she handwaves it all away as being American.  No one really seems to question her speech patterns, or her use of strange terminology which won’t be in practice for many years.

A couple more gruesome murders are discovered, and it’s clear that a serial killer is on the hunt.  Kendra manages to inveigle her way into the investigations, helping the coroner, and putting herself into the path of the killer.  It’s standard fare for the most part – just don’t expect historical reality to get in the way of the process.  There’s a large cast of characters, with a lot of men who may or may not be the killer.  In fact, sometimes it was difficult to remember which person was which.  Alec’s half-brother Gabriel is portrayed as a complete drunken wastrel, and he himself wonders if he is the killer as he blacks out on a regular basis.

Overall, it’s entertaining, but it has it’s drawbacks.  Ms. McElwain could have portrayed Kendra in a little more sympathetic light, using her supposed brilliant mind to make a better effort to blend in.  There’s a bit of romance between Kendra and Alec, as he manages to switch from snark to romantic rather quickly.   The twist at the end of the book, when Kendra figures out who the murderer is, also seemed weak on her part – a true profiler would have realized the detail long before that.  A couple of times, Kendra moans that she’s not solving the case fast enough to prevent the women from being killed – why was she “sent” there if not to do that.  It made me think of the old show “Quantum Leap” when Sam was sent to different time periods to change the outcome of events.  There’s a lot of head hopping that occurs from one paragraph to the next, and several inaccuracies in speech and terms of address, but again, it’s historical fluff that can’t be expected to be correct.  The cover is pretty though!