Kirkyards & Kindness (A Rip Through Time, #4.5) by Kelley Armstrong 
Series: A Rip Through Time #4.5
Published by Self Published on December 2, 2025
Genres: Historical
Pages: 155
Format: eBook
Source: Amazon
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Mallory Mitchell and Dr. Duncan Gray take a break from investigating murder to find the most famous dog in Victorian Scotland.
A year ago, twenty-first-century detective Mallory found herself in 1869 Edinburgh, in the body of Catriona Mitchell, a housemade working for Dr. Duncan Gray, pioneer in forensic science. Shortly after she arrived, she made the unfortunate acquaintence of Catriona’s former criminal mentor, Davina, an entanglement that nearly got Mallory killed. Now she’s about to meet Davina again.
Greyfriars Bobby has disappeared. The little terrier is already a legend, and Davina has made a tidy living showing him off on graveyard tours…while picking the pockets of her guests. When the elderly dog vanishes, Davina calls in a favor from her old student. Mallory agrees to help find Bobby in return for the one thing she’s been unable to get from Davina—the mysterious Catriona’s life story.
Note this is not a full-length novel. It's a novella set after
Death at a Highland Wedding.
Historically accurate but not all that exciting.
I profoundly appreciate an author who is willing to give us a nice novella between novels, especially when only published once a year. This way we can keep enjoying our favorite characters even if only for a silly little side story.
In Kirkyards & Kindness, Kelley Armstrong draws from Scottish history as the background for this one, which involved the dognapping of a little dog known as Greyfriars Bobby. This was an actual little dog who lived at the graveyard, supposedly on the grave of his deceased owner. In this story, Bobby suddenly goes missing drawing Dr. Gray and Mallory into an investigation of what happened to Greyfriars Bobby.
The person looking for the dog, someone charging unsuspecting tourists for a historical tour of the kirkyard, is an old acquaintance of Catriona, whose body Mallory now inhabits. This missing dog is messing with her income stream and she wants the dog returned. Mallory and Duncan have told everyone that Catriona’s “accident” last year has left her with no memory of her old life, and this acquaintance has offered information about Catriona’s history in exchange for finding the dog.
I appreciate the extra work of using this actual Scottish historical fact as background for the story, but I am also grumbling because it wasn’t all the exciting. In a prior novella, we had human trafficking. In the last novella, we met Charles Dickens, Mallory gets her first Victorian Christmas and Duncan and Mallory were drawn into a a case of blackmail. These were more interesting than chasing a missing dog around town.
Any important details we might have gleamed into the former life of Catriona became moot since by the time we got to the payment for solving the dognapping, Mallory and Duncan decided they didn’t care about Catriona’s old life since Mallory is a different person (literally) and was no longer interested in where Catriona came from or things she might have done. Will that bite her in the butt in the future? Probably. But there are so many other issues for the characters to deal with, it will probably be way down the road in the series.
And as long as I am grumbling, as a book nerd I am annoyed by the lack of cohesion to these book covers. They mostly feature the Duncan walking away, but each Mallory/Catriona looks different; and some are drawn and some, like this one, is a photograph. I can appreciate that the novels have a different look than the novellas, that would make sense to set them apart which is fine, but each cover gives us a different Mallory so it is hard to keep her pictured in my mind while I read.
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