48 pages • 1 hour read
Gillian McAllisterWrong Place Wrong Time
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 17-27Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 17 Summary: “Ryan”
Ryan is relocated to a Manchester police training center. His reassignment will involve two organized crime rings, one specializing in boosting luxury cars, the other importing drugs and controlled, the police believe, by Ezra Michaels, who moves the merchandise through the same port in Liverpool. The training center is interested in Ryan’s relationship with his older brother, who has already been pinched twice for drug dealing. They promise Ryan that once he has studied the crime network, he could be useful as a “foot soldier,” or someone willing to go undercover and infiltrate the organization.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Day Minus Thirteen, 19:00”
It is evening. Kelly and Todd discuss the implications of Schrödinger’s cat while they eat Chinese takeout. Jen casually asks Todd how school was—Todd is confused, as Jen has seldom paid any attention to his “stuff.” She assures him that everything he does interests her.
When Todd leaves to meet Clio at a sports pub, Jen follows. She lets herself in the back door of the bar and watches as Clio and Todd play snooker while Jones and Ezra watch. They are joined by a woman Jen’s age with graying hair in a ponytail. Jones calls her “Nicola.” Todd is introduced to her—yet Jen knows he has been texting her.
Suddenly the jukebox comes on loud, and Jen realizes they put on the music to mask their conversation. She retreats to the restroom where, through an open window, she overhears Todd on his phone in the parking lot. He is assuring someone that he can keep a secret. Before Todd hangs up, he says, “see you at home” (159), and Jen realizes Todd is talking to Kelly.
Chapter 19 Summary: “Day Minus Thirteen, 20:40”
Impatient with all the lies and secrets, when Jen gets home, she confronts Kelly. “Who’s Nicola? [...] Who is Joseph Jones?” (161). Kelly denies everything and storms out.
Chapter 20 Summary: “Ryan”
Ryan has been on surveillance duty for two months. He has gathered massive amounts of information on the crime rings. His supervisors are impressed. As they are about to propose promoting him, they receive intel that Ezra’s crime ring has hit that night, a BMW that had a baby in the back.
Chapter 21 Summary: “Day Minus Twenty-Two, 18:30”
Jen, now in her office, contemplates how Kelly could be so adept at lying. She wishes her late father, an accomplished lawyer, could advise her. Overwhelmed, she accepts Rakesh’s invitation to have a drink.
Hours later, drunk, Jen walks home. She struggles to figure out why the missing baby poster, the police badge, and the phone—if, as she figures, all belong to Kelly—were in Todd’s room. When she gets closer to home, she hears Kelly and Todd arguing in the garden. Kelly is demanding that Todd break up with Clio. Kelly, angry, reminds Todd that Jones will certainly “find out.” For now, Todd shouts, he can “keep it secret” (172). Left alone, Kelly cries.
Chapter 22 Summary: “Day Minus Forty-Seven, 08:30”
It is now mid-September. Jen ponders what Jones is destined to find out and how Clio fits: “It’s so confusing” (174). It is the first of the fall term, and Clio shows up to walk with Todd to school.
Jen follows them in her car. She offers Clio, who does not start school until the next day, a ride home. As they talk, Clio reveals how often Kelly visits her uncle’s building: “Kelly, Ezra, and Joseph—they go way back, right?” (180).
Jen is certain her husband is having an affair with Nicola Williams, and plans to confront Kelly that night. Before she can ask anything, a phone goes off in Kelly’s front pants pocket, although his phone is in his back pocket. He says it is his business line. He volunteers to go get Indian takeout for dinner. Jen believes he is either meeting someone or taking the call. From her front window, she watches him leave. A few houses down, Kelly meets Jones. Jones passes Kelly a small bag.
Todd comes down for dinner and, when Jen presses him, admits that Kelly knows his boss and that he had asked him not to tell her. Jen heads out the door to follow Kelly to the Indian restaurant. He is outside the restaurant on the burner phone she found in Todd’s room. She hears him say that he will bring the spare key and says goodbye to “Nic.”
Jen confronts him with the evidence of the burner phone, the poster for the kidnapped baby, and the police badge for someone named Ryan Hiles. He tries to lie. He shows her the key and the two phones but refuses to explain any of it. Burner phones, illegal transactions, and a missing baby, she rages. Kelly advises her not to get mixed up in the missing baby: “You’re in danger, Jen” (190). She tells him not to come home if he can’t tell her everything.
Chapter 23 Summary: “Ryan”
The undercover police squad has shifted into high gear—recon has revealed the crooks stole a BMW with a four-month-old baby named Eve in the backseat. The mother had left the car running while she ran back into the house to grab her phone. The police try to figure out what the crooks will do when they find the baby. Ryan tells them their first obligation will be to get the stolen car to the port; at least that’s what his older brother, Kelly, would do.
Chapter 24 Summary: “Day Minus Sixty, 08:00”
It is now two weeks earlier. Jen activates the tracker on Kelly’s phone while he showers. Later in the morning she sees he is not unblocking a chimney as he said but was at a posh hotel in Liverpool. She dispatches her office trainee to go to the hotel and report on what Kelly is doing. Assuming Jen is spying on an unfaithful husband for a case, the trainee heads out.
When she returns, the trainee tells Jen the man met a woman named Nic. She could tell it was not a romantic meeting—they discussed business and someone named Joe who was “inside.” Jen understands what that word means. She Googles and finds out Jones was released from prison only a week earlier after serving 20 years for, among other crimes, drug trafficking and car theft.
Chapter 25 Summary: “Day Minus Sixty-Five, 17:05”
Now two months before the murder, Jen finds herself at work. She gets a visitor. It is Jones. He asks about her husband, whom he calls an “old friend.” Jen realizes Jones’s release from prison set in motion his murder by her son.
Chapter 26 Summary: “Day Minus One Hundred and Five, 08:55”
It is mid-July. Jen drives to the prison where Jones has been serving 20 years. Jones comes to the community room. Jen introduces herself and gets right to the point: “How do you know my [husband]?” (208). He says she should ask her husband. Then he asks: “How could you not know?” (208). Suddenly, Jen realizes that her husband—who always keeps to himself, always worked alone, always had money but no financial records—has “a dark edge” (210). As Jones returns to his cell, a storm breaks out. Jen trembles with rage.
Chapter 27 Summary: “Day Minus One Hundred and Forty-Four, 18:30”
It is June. Jen understands her husband is involved in organized crime. She wonders: Is that why Todd kills Jones? But who is Nicola Williams and Ryan Hiles, the name on the police badge?
Kelly is supposedly away on his annual camping trip with school chums. When Jen checks her phone, she sees he is nowhere near the campgrounds, but at a house in Salford, some 40 miles away. Jen makes an excuse to Todd about going to her office and Ubers to Salford. Kelly’s car passes them going the opposite way.
Rather than follow him, Jen wants to know where he has been. She finds a tiny boarded-up home. The sign on the door identifies the place as Sandalwood. She peers through the grimy windows and sees a framed photograph of a much younger Kelly standing next to an older man. To Jen, they seem like twins. But Kelly has no living relatives. On the way back, she Googles the property. It is listed in foreclosure. She wonders: “What does it all mean?” (224).
Chapters 17-27 Analysis
Jen, who is independent and empowered, discovers her need for others. Up until this point, the novel has centered on Jen’s emerging insight into her role as a mother and her love for Todd. In these chapters, the focus shifts to her husband, whom she has never questioned. Jen realizes how much she does not know him. When she overhears Todd talking secretively on his phone outside the snooker bar, she feels anxiety: “[L]ike she’s on a boat, the ground underfoot uncertain and slippery. Kelly. Her Kelly. The man she can tell everything to. But, evidently, that doesn’t work both ways” (166).
McAllister uses a simile, where something is compared to something else using “like” or “as.” In this case, McAllister likens Jen’s upheaval to a boat over an unsteady surface. The more Jen learns, the further back she moves in time, and the more uncertain she becomes about Kelly. Evidence suggests that the self-employed contractor named Kelly Brotherhood may be an elaborate masquerade.
At the same time, the novel reveals who he is through the chapters about Ryan, his real identity. Ryan’s plotline will converge with Jen’s as the novel progresses, culminating in illumination.
On the surface, the mention of Schrödinger’s cat highlights how Todd is a nerdy brainiac. It also presents Todd and Kelly as foils of one another, or characters who reveal each other through contrasting traits (Kelly is not a science nerd, and happily admits he is not even listening). Schrödinger’s cat also serves to illustrate how there isn’t certainty—both in physics and in the novel.
The thought problem of Schrödinger’s cat was first proposed in 1935 by quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961). A theoretical cat is placed in a locked box sealed with radioactive poison. Without opening the box, no one can know for sure whether the cat is dead or alive—at the moment of not knowing, the cat is both. The problem demonstrates multiple states of simultaneous existence, and teaches how certainty is unreliable.
Jen comes to see that Kelly Brotherhood is Kelly and not Kelly. Like the cat, he is both. Jen can’t maintain these contradictory realities. She wants answers. Nicola Williams is actually the undercover cop Ryan/Kelly worked with 20 years earlier when they brought down the Jones Gang, but Jen doesn’t know this. She believes he is having an affair with Nicola, which would explain his secret phone, the mysterious calls he takes during dinner, and the insistence that he does not know either Nicola Williams or Joseph Jones. His denials, Jen knows, are lies, as she witnessed Kelly’s clandestine meeting with Jones on their street. She wrongly suspects that Kelly is in cahoots with the man his son, just weeks later, will knife to death.
Kelly appears to be a liar, a philanderer, and an emotionally wounded, broken man. In the bathroom alone in the dark, Kelly is in tears, a gesture out of character. Jen hears sobbing like “a wounded animal slowly dying” (172). Like Schrödinger’s cat, Kelly exists in two mutually exclusive realities simultaneously. This is suggested symbolically by his two phones, which correspond to his two radically different lives.
