Review: Death at a Highland Wedding by Kelley Armstrong

Posted February 11, 2025 by Lucy D in Book Reviews, Crime Drama / 0 Comments

Review:  Death at a Highland Wedding by Kelley ArmstrongDeath at a Highland Wedding (A Rip Through Time, #4) by Kelley Armstrong
five-stars
Series: A Rip Through Time #4
Published by Minotaur Books on May 20, 2025
Genres: Crime Drama
Pages: 336
Format: eBook
Source: Netgalley
amazon b-n
Goodreads

I received this book for free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Death at a Highland Wedding is the fourth installment in New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong's gripping Rip Through Time Novels.
After slipping 150 years into the past, modern-day homicide detective Mallory Atkinson has embraced her new life in Victorian Scotland as housemaid Catriona Mitchel. Although it isn’t what she expected, she's developed real, meaningful relationships with the people around her and has come to love her role as assistant to undertaker Dr. Duncan Gray and Detective Hugh McCreadie.
Mallory, Gray, and McCreadie are on their way to the Scottish Highlands for McCreadie's younger sister's wedding. The McCreadies and the groom’s family, the Cranstons, have a complicated history which has made the weekend quite uncomfortable. But the Cranston estate is beautiful so Gray and Mallory decide to escape the stifling company and set off to explore the castle and surrounding wilderness. They discover that the groom, Archie Cranston, a slightly pompous and prickly man, has set up deadly traps in the woods for the endangered Scottish wildcats, and they soon come across a cat who's been caught and severely injured. Oddly, Mallory notices the cat's injuries don't match up with the intricacies of the trap. These strange irregularities, combined with the secretive and erratic behavior of the groom, put Mallory and Duncan on edge. And then when one of the guests is murdered, they must work fast to uncover the murderer before another life is lost.
New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong’s unique time travel mystery series continues to entertain as Mallory adjusts to life in the 1870s.


 

A misunderstanding knocks the friendship between Duncan and Mallory off course. 🙁

After being attacked in an alley while investigating the screams of a young woman, Det. Mallory Atkinson has body-swapped with a young Victorian housemaid named Catriona Mitchell in 1869 Scotland. Mallory was lucky enough to find herself in the household of Dr. Duncan Gray, a doctor at the beginning of criminal forensics and now moved up from housemaid to Dr.’s assistant.

In Death at a Highland Wedding, Mallory has been invited to attend the wedding of Fiona McCreadie, Hugh McCreadie’s sister along with Dr. Duncan Gray and his sister, Isla Ballantyne. It seems that McCreadie was once engaged to the groom’s sister, Violet, in a long term arrangement between the families. When McCreadie decided to leave his family and pursue an actual job in law enforcement (or more to the point, the first time he laid eyes on then Isla Gray), he broke the engagement. Now his younger sister is about to marry Violet’s older brother, Cranston, in order to join the families.

Our party is invited to partake in the festivities to take place in the days leading up to the rest of the guests arriving for the wedding. Which should have been fine except that Violet is still harboring feelings about the broken engagement which left her a jilted and undesirable bride, this makes everyone a bit uncomfortable.

When one of the guests winds up dead in the wee hours of the morning, Mallory, McCreadie and Duncan work to figure out what caused his death, but more importantly, whether or not the guest was actually mistaken for the groom. In a house full of possible suspects, all with possible motives, along with an entire Village who are not too happy with their new local Lord, Mallory first needs to determine who was the intended victim, before she can figure out who murdered him.

THOUGHTS:
I told you I was a little obsessed with this series. I like crime stories and I like historical romances and I love this character is looking at life in 1896 through the eyes of a modern female detective and not just our modern sensibilities reading about people living in the past, dealing with the issues of the past, such as what is inappropriate for a young unmarried woman.

As far as the mystery, we had a lot of suspects and as I said, they first had to figure out if the victim was the intended victim or was the groom the intended victim.  So many theories were thrown around, if it was supposed to be the actual victim, this guy, this guy or this guy could have done it for these reasons…or if it was supposed to be the other guy, here’s a list of who and why someone wanted him dead. This is all complicated by the fact that McCreadie is out of his jurisdiction and the local village constable is pretty much a kid who has no idea what he is doing, especially with a murder and does not want help from the big city detective. This one was actually more a Mallory/McCreadie investigation rather than Mallory/Duncan since they easily figured out how he died, but looking at clues and interviewing witnesses came down to the two detectives.

Even things like why is Violet still so hung up on the broken arranged marriage to Hugh? They weren’t in love or was she? And why hasn’t she married yet, did her broken engagement really make her such a social pariah? And what’s with the creepy groundskeeper? Lots of mysteries to solve.

There is also that will they/won’t they spark between not only Mallory and Duncan but also McCreadie and Isla where everyone knows how everyone feels except the two people pretending they don’t have feelings. In this story, we do take a step forward with Isla and Hugh but maybe a giant step back for Mallory and Duncan. 🙁  If Isla and Hugh get together and obviously marry, then Mallory as an unmarried woman, but no longer a servant, cannot continue to live in a house alone with Duncan, an unmarried man.

The obvious issues between a romance with Mallory and Duncan are Doctor and assistant (although everyone makes comments presuming they must be sleeping together). Neither one wants to blur that line between them, and of course, each believes that they are only one interested in something more. Not to be a spoiler but suddenly, after having to jump through hoops just to discuss the case in a way that does not appear inappropriate, Duncan seems to suggest that if they were married they could have a simple conversation without concerns for propriety. Things get very awkward and very angry very quickly. As I said, they each believe they are the only one with romantic feelings, and I had to re-read to see why things suddenly go wrong. Obviously, Duncan comes off very practical about the idea and Mallory is hurt as a modern woman, she wants to marry for love not practicality, especially because she has romantic feelings. It took me awhile to figure out why Duncan was suddenly so hurt? His suggestion was that feelings might blossom somewhere down the road, while he was thinking Mallory might someday develop feelings for him, Mallory misunderstands and her response is worded in such a way that comes off as “never gonna happen.” So where this could have fast-forwarded the romance between them, they are now both a little hurt and awkward with each other and it is going to negatively effect future stories for awhile. I’m so sad I want to cry. Of course they both seemed to have forgotten one basic fact, that if something happens and Mallory is returned to her own time, leaving Catrina to return to her body, Duncan would suddenly find himself married to a thief and con-artist with no possible divorce.

I do enjoy the audiobook  version of this series.  While I am happy to get my hands on an ARC, I do miss the narrator and her characterizations.

I want more stories please.  And can we (pretty please) fix this issue between Mallory and Duncan!


Favorite Scene:

Both shillelagh heads are roughly the same size. I’ll measure them, of course, but weapon-matching is not the exact science I used to see on TV. Even Gray knows that.

Okay, I should say Gray especially knows that, since it’s one of his main areas of research. He realized years ago that it might be possible to match wounds to weapons, and he’s published several papers on it. What he’s learned, though, is that there’s wiggle room, mostly because, well, flesh wiggles. He can tell whether a stab was made by a kitchen knife or a switchblade.  But if he has potential weapons with similar blades of slightly different sizes, he can rarely choose one with enough certainty to risk a suspect’s life on it.

Likewise with blunt force trauma, it’s not as if the scalp and skull took a perfect impression of the weapon. The amount of force used plays a role, as does speed, tissue elasticity, length of contact…These are all things I vaguely knew as a detective, but I’ve now actually helped Gray prove them.

Science isn’t magic, and I appreciate that Gray recognizes the fallibility of his work. Putting too much faith in forensics–especially early forensics–sent many people to the gallows. Hell, it continues to send people to death row, when juries raised on CSI get overly excited about scientific “proof.”

Even after measuring, we can only say that both shillelaghs are possible murder weapons, based on the width of their club-like ends. Then we try matching up the knobs, but that’s trickier than you’d think. We end up with two possible points of impact on each shillelagh.

“I believe we require a demonstration,” Gray says.

“Uh…”

“Stand right there, face the window, and let me club you in the back of the head. Then we can see which knobs line up correctly.” He catches my look and raises his brows, eyes twinkling. “For science?”

“You believe that’s a valid science experiment?”

His lips twitch. “I do. The question is whether you are committed enough to try it.”

“No, it’s whether you’re committed enough. Because I’m nowhere near Ezra’s height.” I lift a shillelagh with my bare hand. “Turn around, Doctor.”

He smiles and shakes his head. “I was joking, of course.”

“He says now,” I mutter. “You do realize the implications of a man threatening to hit a woman in his employ.”

That smile evaporates. “I did not intend–“

“I’m kidding, but you deserved that.”

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