The Killing Time by Elly Griffiths

Series: Ali Dawson (#2)

Format: 352 pages, Hardcover

Published: February 12, 2026 by Waterstones UK 

Mystery/Crime/From library

No more time travel. Her coworker is stuck in the 1850s. Life goes on.

Ali gets a new cold case and that takes her into contact with a medium. Who says strange things. There is also the fact that she has proof that she will travel back in time again. And then her cat goes missing! Ok, this sounds weird when I write it, but dang I would do anything for my cat too.

Ali is mean to have an affair in the past so will that happen now? Wink wink? Will she ever find her cat? And can the medium really see ghosts as he knows things?

I enjoyed it and I like Ali, she is 40+. Been married 3 times and takes no shit.

Ali Dawson is a police detective who leads a unit that investigates cases so cold her team must travel to the distant past to solve them. But Ali and the team haven't been allowed to time-travel ever since their technical expert, Jones, got stuck in Victorian London, never to be seen again.

To distract herself from meaningless tasks, Ali decides to look into a present-day case - a series of apparent suicides, all young men who fell to their death from high places. She believes the deaths are linked to a psychic medium called Barry Power, who convinced the boys they could fly. Ali goes to one of Power's shows where he claims to be in contact with Jones.

When Ali notices that evening that her cat, Terry, has gone missing, she decides to go back in time just long enough to prevent Terry from escaping through his open cat flap. A dangerous plan which backfires, and she finds herself once more in Victorian London, where she meets Jones, as well as Power, and the darkly mysterious Cain Templeton with whom Ali has unfinished business from her previous visit to the past . . .