The time travel series A Rip Through Time is clever, with a fascinating premise and much informative detail about life in Victorian Edinburgh through Kelley Armstrong's deft melding of fact and fiction. Those are just a few of the many reasons to read these books.

In this third installment, DISTURBING THE DEAD, Mallory Atkinson is "treated" to the Victorian fad of all things Egyptian as she and Dr. Duncan Gray attend a mummy unwrapping party. Of course, being that Mallory is from the 21st century and has been thrown back to Victorian Edinburgh, she retains modern sensibilities and knows that unwrapping a mummy is a completely disrespectful manner in which to treat the remains of a human being. Many in that time also share that belief, but what the aristocracy wants, they get. As is wont to happen in a murder mystery, this event leads to a homicide that Mallory and her friends will spend the rest of the pages solving.

"The plot and the clever, well-written dialogue serve to propel the mystery forward as we struggle to figure out who the perpetrator might be.... [T]hese characters grow on us and become people we like and want to hear about."

In modern times, Mallory was a 30-year-old Canadian detective. But when visiting Edinburgh to see her beloved grandmother before she died, Mallory was attacked while out on a jog. At the same time, 150 years in the past, housemaid Catriona Mitchell was being attacked. Mallory wakes up in the body of young, attractive Catriona, who turned out to be a truly awful person, so it took time for Mallory to gain the confidence of most of Duncan’s household.

Duncan is not your typical main character in that he is dark-skinned but also a member of London society. He is the result of an affair that his mother had with a man who then took it upon himself to raise Duncan with the two daughters from his marriage. So Isla, Duncan's widowed sister, resides with him in their family home. Duncan is a doctor but really runs the family business, a funeral home. Isla is a chemist, an occupation that is very unusual for women in that era. Both are wealthy and progressive. After they are convinced that Mallory is who she says she is, they include her in their activities, and Duncan makes her part of his murder investigations. Hugh McCreadie, Duncan's best friend and a police detective, also is in on Mallory's secret as the three of them work together, with Isla's occasional help.

DISTURBING THE DEAD has a twist regarding time travel that the first two books in the series do not. This results in a definite pivot in the narrative that is really well done. It enables Mallory to shift her priorities and allows us to look forward to her spreading her roots in the past as she builds on her relationships and her "career" with the attendant difficulties that any woman might have experienced back then. As Armstrong herself suggests, it's much better to have read A RIP THROUGH TIME and THE POISONER'S RING so that the background of the characters and their past interactions are fully detailed. The information about the underground market and the historical use of certain herbs in medicine is fascinating, as are the details regarding the female medical students and their struggle to be allowed to practice medicine.

The mystery is quite well done, with many red herrings, a term that Mallory actually uses with her friends and then must explain. The time travel aspect and Mallory's use of modern colloquialisms provide authenticity and more than a bit of humor to the narrative. The plot and the clever, well-written dialogue serve to propel the mystery forward as we struggle to figure out who the perpetrator might be. As with Armstrong's other series, these characters grow on us and become people we like and want to hear about. We want to know what comes next for them, so we wait for the next novel in the same manner as we might schedule lunch with a friend to catch up on news. We are hooked.