Wrong Place Wrong Time, written by Gillian McAllister, was published on May 12, 2022, making a strong impact on the market from publication till 2025 and hence here’s the Wrong Place Wrong Time – Book Summary 2025 alongside review, critique and more.
It went on to become the Sunday Times Thriller of the Year and won the Nielsen Bestseller Award, amplifying its vast market sales. Wrong Place Wrong Time was among the nominees for the Goodreads Choice Awards and was highly cherished by book critics.
As of October 2023, Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister has sold over 1.1 million copies and translated into 31 foreign territories and became an instant global bestseller.
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About The Author
Gillian McAllister, a British author who has made a remarkable impact on the best-selling book market by producing seven outstanding thriller novels. Born on February 28, 1985, she initially pursued a degree in English, earning a 2:1 BA (Hons), before shifting her focus to studying law. She has always been a writer for as long as she can remember, with writing being a cherished hobby throughout her adulthood. Her debut novel, ‘Everything But The Truth‘, was published to great acclaim and reached number six on the Sunday Times Bestseller List.
She has been awarded several accolades throughout her career some of which are:
- Nielsen Bestseller Award
- Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award
- Kindle Store Bestseller
Gulliat McAllister has left a lasting impact in the thriller book market, and copies of her works still continue to top the lists even today. She keeps her readers updated on below socials:
Book Ratings
- Goodreads: 4/5
- Amazon: 4.2/5
- Barnes & Noble: 4.7/5
What is the “Wrong Place Wrong Time” book about?
‘Wrong Place Wrong Time‘ is a book that revolves around theme of time travel, organized crime, the power of motherhood, and subconscious memory. At its core, the book explores how time is perceived differently by individuals, how people notice things in unique ways, and how the subconscious mind operates. It provides insights into noticing and remembering minute details in your surroundings, highlighting that even when everything seems normal, there might be something happening that your subconscious has picked up on, even if you haven’t consciously realized it yet.
The book also delves into the concept of Hysterical Strength, which refers to the extraordinary physical strength humans can display, often beyond what is considered normal. This phenomenon typically occurs in life-or-death situations, particularly involving mothers.
Main Characters
- Jen-The protagonist, mother of Todd, lawyer by profession
- Todd – Jen’s son, whose actions become the heart of the story’s mystery
- Kelly- Jen’s husband, decorator/painter by profession
- Ryan – undercover police agent working undercover in a gang
- Joseph Jones: the criminal gang member
- Leo: police officer investigating the crime linked to Todd
- Clio: girlfriend of Todd
- Victor: Jen’s Father, lawyer by profession
Plot Summary
‘Wrong Place Wrong Time’ is a time travelling thriller with Jen being the central narrator interrupted by Ryan‘s narrative here and there. The plot is written 32 chapters with the book being 370 pages long.
The book ‘Wrong Place, Wrong Time’ begins on a fine Halloween morning, where the protagonist, Jen, wakes up and describes her life. She talks about how her high-maintenance lawyer profession is tough to balance with her family life as a wife and mother. Jen is highly focused on her career and is a dedicated lawyer working at a law firm her father owns. On a typical day, she is always found working and prioritizing her clients over house chores, and other responsibilities.
On the other hand, her husband, Kelly, is a family man who looks after the house, his wife, and their son. He is a handsome, stout and decorator/painter by profession. Unlike other men, he is reserved, quite antisocial, secretive, and has a great sense of humor.
Their son, Todd, is a nerdy student who excels in science and is an absolute genius. He’s a straight A student, every teachers dream. So the book starts with:
Jen is glad of the clocks going back tonight. A gained hour, extra time , to be spent pretending she is inviting up for her son. Now that it is past midnight, it is officially the 13th of October. Almost Halloween .
As she enjoys her tea, looking out towards the front garden, she sees her son drive a knife into someone. It gets hectic with Jen, Kelly and others rushing to the scene and calling emergency services. Soon, the police arrive and takes Todd away. Jen and Kelly return home from the police station without their son, and there’s nothing a she can do to save her son, except blame herself for bad parenting.
Todd was not like other kids. He was smart, intelligent, and a bit of a nerd. There was no possibility that he could kill someone. With these thoughts rushing through her mind, she somehow fell asleep, only to wake up the next morning and realize that she was living the same day again — the day her son kills somebody. She was frightened, traumatized, and confused, and she couldn’t believe she had traveled back a day in time. It was probably déjà vu, she constantly reminded herself.
As she falls asleep, she find herself thinking that Todd is here, safe in there house, grounded. As she has the knife. Perhaps it has been stopped. Whatever it is. Perhaps she will wake and it will be tomorrow. The day after. Anything but today again.
But to her dismay, she keeps waking up in the past. Each day, she discovers something new about her family as she keeps going further back. She starts with one day at a time, then weeks, then years, and so on until she reaches the time when she first met her husband.
At first, she learns that her son has a girlfriend named Clio. As she continues to travel miserably further into the past, she discovers that Clio is somehow connected to a man named Joseph Jones who’s exactly the person told kills. She assumes that these individuals might have been a bad influence, pushing her son toward committing a murder. However, it still doesn’t make sense to her.
As she retraced her steps, she discovered that Joseph Jones ran an organized criminal gang whose job was to steal cars and traffic them outside the country. Gradually, as she pieced everything together, she realized that her husband somehow knew Joseph Jones and was involved in whatever had happened to Todd. She couldn’t believe that her husband could be acquainted with a gang leader.
Throughout her entire career she has always looked for the absence of things as well as presence. Evidence is often in what people don’t say. What they take out. The man who fiddles his accounts, trying to burry huge personal profit in 25 boxes of disclosure that he hopes the lawyers won’t be bothered to go through. But she missed it at home. The lack of this easy banter. A clue in itself.
Moving forward, she realizes that her husband has more secrets than truths he has ever told her. Kelly had claimed he had no family, yet here she is, discovering a brother named Ryan. Somehow, Ryan is connected to her son’s incident, but she has yet to uncover how.
After enduring years and even decades of uncertainty, she finally learns the shocking truth: her husband, Kelly, was not the real Kelly. The real Kelly had died of an overdose as a teenager, and his brother, Ryan—who was working undercover in the criminal world—had assumed Kelly’s identity.
But that wasn’t all. Ryan, posing as Kelly, had been secretly investigating her father, who, unbeknownst to her, had been involved in organized crime. She had lost her father a couple of years earlier, completely unaware of his criminal affiliations. She couldn’t have imagined that her father was part of a crime syndicate or that her husband, Kelly (actually Ryan), was an undercover police officer working on the case.
Will Jen be able to save herself? Will their family be able to unite like before? Will they be able to live a normal life again? Will she ever wake up in 2022 and not in the past?
Will she be able to break free from this vicious time-traveling loop? A lot of questions arise throughout the novel, and to answer them all, let’s say yes. To find out how everything resolves, how she manages to escape the endless cycle of traveling into the past, and how she prevents her son from killing Joseph Jones, you must pick up ‘Wrong Place Wrong Time’ and see for yourself!
A strange feeling descends around her, like fine mist. Deja Vu. What was? She shakes her head. Stolen babies and… Gangs? She blinks, and its gone. How strange. She never gets deja vu. And on such a normal evening, too.
Hysterical Strength
Hysterical Strength is a display of extreme strength by humans, beyond what is believe to be normal, usefully occurring in life for death situations, particularly involving mothers. Anecdotal reports are of women lifting cars to rescue newborn babies, sometimes creating a huge force field of energy.
Indeed more supernatural reports have also be noted such as time loops, though none have been proved to date. Sufferers often report deja vu alongside episodes of Hysterical strength.
Critique
Wrong Place Wrong Time is a well-written book with a sound vocabulary that does not overwhelm the reader. It also maintains the rhythm and flow of the story at a standard level. Although the book has a tremendous twist in the middle and is quite intriguing, the initial chapters can be confusing.
This is because the names Kelly and Jen might cause gender-related ambiguity, as Kelly sounds more feminine to some readers. As a result, the first few chapters may feel unclear. Other than that, the flow of the story in the first half progresses linearly, which might lead readers to lose interest in remembering details that only make sense in the second half.
The latter part of the book is far more engaging and intriguing, as the earlier details are tied together effectively. However, for regular thriller readers, the pacing may feel somewhat slow.
Nevertheless as noted by The Sunday Times, it is “a novel with a difference.”
FAQs
Is Wrong Place Wrong Time Book worth reading?
Definitely Yes. Wrong Place Wrong Time is quite worth reading, especially for thriller enthusiasts, because of its intriguing plot twists. It can be said that it’s one of the most inventive thrillers of the year—absolutely astonishing, original, and ingenious. The first half of the book might take a little time to get accustomed to, but the second half makes it all worthwhile. The initial chapters lay the groundwork and raise countless questions, all of which the latter half brilliantly answers. For thriller readers, this is definitely a recommended read.
Who to read if you like Gillian McAllister?
Authors who write similar books are:
Lisa Jewell: The Family Upstairs, Then She Was Gone
Ruth Ware: The Woman in Cabin 10, The Turn of the Key.
Shari Lapena: The Couple Next Door, Not a Happy Family.
T.M. Logan: The Holiday, The Curfew
Clare Mackintosh: I Let You Go, Hostage
All books by Gillian McAllister 2025
- Everything But The Truth (2017)
- Anything You Do Say (2017)
- No Further Questions (2018)
- The Evidence Against You (2019)
- How To Disappear (2020)
- That Night (2021)
- Wrong Place Wrong Time (2022)
- Just Another Missing Person (2023)
- Famous Last Words (2025)
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