Ripples in Time by Julie McElwain
It's July 1816, rapidly approaching a full year to mark how long FBI agent Kendra Donovan has been living some two hundred years in the past. Kendra is a fantastic character, embodying both likable flaws and incredible practicality, method, and intelligence. Having accidentally fallen through some kind of wormhole, traveling from 2016 to 1816, she is beginning to finally acclimate (willingly) to her surroundings, while still maintaining a strong sense of self and her own identity.
As Kendra begins work on the latest case to land in her lap, she gains first-hand knowledge of the atrocities and poor treatment of women in this time period and the views of what was seen as progressive practices for handling the mentally unstable — and what defined the term mentally unstable.
While McElwain is still paring down her use of alternate points of view, I still hope for a book that simply settles into solely being narrated by Kendra. While I do occasionally enjoy viewing the heroine through others' eyes, I more appreciate to stay with the detective whose mind would be more like my own — modern. Also, I do still appreciate the little phrases she bandies about without a thought, only to realize they are anachronistically used and is forced to further define what she means — McElwain continues to handle these smoothly and they make for a little, organic moment of humor.
Kendra seems to be mostly relaxing into her new era, but with the upcoming anniversary of her time travel event, she is growing antsy with having to potentially actively choose to stay. But as this discontent settles down, I hope she begins to broaden her approach to casework and stop making those moves where she disappears without telling people where she's going or what she intends. She's much too experienced and mature for that type of hangup (trope), and I really want her to embrace her motley team. Perhaps she even eventually tell the rest of that small group the truth about who she is and where she's from.
Regardless, the pacing is just as page-turn inducing as the previous five in this series, and I actually had trouble deciding on the guilty party up to the reveal. Kendra has grown tremendously as a character. I hope for some continued growth for her, and maybe some more fleshing out for her fiancé Alec, and his uncle the Duke, as I look forward to a seventh installment.
