I’ve been enjoying books by author Sarah Pekkanen for years and was so excited to read this newest release! It was such a fun cat and mouse thriller full of twists!

🎧I paired the audio with the physical book, which is my favorite way to read and escape, and fully immerse myself into the reading/listening experience.

WHAT TO EXPECT
-mother/daughter relationships
-told in 3 parts
-multiple POVs
-unreliable narrators
-deception

*many thanks to St Martins Press, Macmillan Audio and Netgalley for the gifted copy for review

Sarah Pekkanen is an auto-buy for me. I will pre-order books of her that I don't even know what they are about. She always delivers and never disappoints. GONE TONIGHT is no different. The pacing was fast and I could FEEL that relationship between the mother and daughter so deeply. My heart was pounding throughout. Chock full of secrets and plenty of twists and turns it was hard to put this down. INCREDIBLE and a must-read for thriller readers...and really ANY reader who wants a GREAT story. I wish I could give more than 5 stars!!!!
Thank you to St. Martin's Press, Netgalley and Sarah Pekkanen for this ARC. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

So so good!! This is a page turner! If you haven't added this to your library or TBR, do so immediately. How well does Catherine really know her mother? As pieces of her past begin to pop up, Catherine begins to wonder who her mother really is. Is Ruth Sterling her real name? Did she really grow up in this small town? Why does her mother always seem ready to run at a moment's notice?

Oh, wow! This book is amazing. Once I started it, I was pulled into the story. The characters were great, I was feeling what they felt, such good writing. I could and would love to see this made into a movie, although I'm not sure it would come across the same as the written words. The things we do for love....
Thanks to netgalley, the publisher and author for the chance to read this advanced copy.

I was super excited to read Gone Tonight, and while I found it so engaging at the beginning, I couldn't help but feel as though everything fizzled out at the end. Catherine and Ruth were both such captivating characters with fascinating secrets that kept me pulled in, but what I expected in a thriller of this nature didn't happen. There was no plot twist or big reveal (in my opinion); instead, the plot sort of just fluttered along through what could have been an amazing climax, so by the end of the book, I was just bored by the entire story. I'm still bummed about this book personally, but I loved the short chapters and the dual POVs.

Good story of a woman escaping her past and her psychotic boyfriend and starting a new life, hiding her past , and always on the run to protect her daughter. So,e interest8mg twists, and fears.

Great suspense!

Catherine Sterling is a nurse. She has been working in a memory unit in a facility but now she is ready to move to Baltimore and start working at John Hopkins. Then, she starts noticing that her mother, Ruth Sterling is starting to have some memory issues. Shockingly she learned her grandmother had early-onset Alzheimer's. In the blink of an eye, her plans dissipate like smoke. She can't leave her mom this way, she has to stay and take care of her. As far as she can remember, Ruth has been there for her. They have been each other's support system.

Catherine is ready to give up her future when some incongruences start making her doubt what her mother has told her since she was a kid. Her mother is hiding things and Catherine must find out what is true and why is Ruth lying to her.

I liked how the story unfolded. The dual POV and the past and present timelines enriched the experience instead of making it difficult to follow. I liked both characters and I was scared of the outcome that was being foreshadowed.

The narrator, Kate Mara did a good job with both characters.

Cliffhanger: No

4/5 Fangs

A complimentary copy was provided by St. Martin's Press/Macmillan Audio via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

If you like a dark, twisted tale with untrustworthy characters that begins to get predictable after a few chapters and requires numerous trigger warnings, you may enjoy this but it was not the book for me. There was nobody to root for and though there was a touching scene at the end it wasn't enough for me to care.
I received this as an ARC from Netgalley to review in exchange for my honest thoughts.

From the cover and author, I thought Gone Tonight by Sarah Pekkanen was a suspense or thriller novel, but after the first few chapters, I was confused. It read like women's fiction about a woman and her adult daughter navigating a health crisis. Slowly some hints surface that all is not as it appears, and then the plot escalated quickly!

I appreciated this slow burn suspense novel. I was never completely sure either main character's motives, which I enjoy in stories with a mystery to solve. The involvement of the daughter's workplace was an interesting aspect; I'm relieved I no longer have family members who reside at a senior living facility. I questioned the detailed flashbacks to the mother's high school years ... until I didn't.

Occasionally I anticipated a minor twist in the plot, but for the most part this story surprised me time and again. I listened to the audiobook narrated by Kate Mara which was the perfect balance of intensity, although at first it was a bit confusing to track the daughter vs. the mother voiced by the same narrator.

Thank you to Macmillan Audio and NetGalley for the review copy of the audiobook.

Thank you to Netgalley, the publishing house and the author for the opportunity to read a complimentary copy of this book in return for a review based upon my honest opinion

Ruth Sterling is getting forgetful, her daughter Catherine is becoming concerned. Catherine works in the alzheimer's unit in a seniors home and wonders if the signs she is seeing are what she thinks they are. catherine is due to move to Boston to a new job and now wonders if she can leave her mother alone. They are all one another has, no family, no ties, just them, as it has always been. As Catherine looks further into the matter, she wonders if her mother is being truthful, if everything she has known is a lie. She knows nothing about her mother's past, about who she was. As Catherine gets closer to the truth, she does not realize she may be endangering herself. Ruth Sterling has spent her whole life with one directive, keep Catherine safe. Just how far will Ruth go to hide her past and keep Catherine safe, how far would any mother go?

This was a great book. I liked the pace and even though some of it wasn't too hard to guess, the story was told well. Some good plot twists and I liked the ending.

Sarah Pekkanen has had an admirable career: She started out writing women’s fiction, transitioned into mysteries, then began co-authoring thrillers with her editor, Greer Hendricks. Her latest solo offering, the thriller Gone Tonight, shows that she’s absorbed all the lessons from these different genres to pen a captivating story that upends reader expectations with every plot point.

After being kicked out by her religious parents and disowned by her boyfriend, Ruth Sterling ran away from her Virginia home to raise her daughter Catherine all on her own. Like a grittier version of the Gilmore Girls, they were each other’s best friends. Ruth waitressed while Catherine would do her homework in a booth. They moved several times when the money ran out. But now Catherine is a newly graduated nurse, eager to start a job at Johns Hopkins, and things finally seem to be looking up.

And then Ruth is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. She admits to Catherine that her own mother died of it several years ago. She didn’t tell Catherine because she didn’t want her to worry.

Catherine is crushed. The Johns Hopkins job is now out of the question. How can she leave her mother to face this disease alone? How can she lose her mother when she knows so little of the woman’s past? And is there a chance that she’s inherited the Alzheimer’s gene? Wanting to know more about her mother before her memory slips away permanently, Catherine leaves her a journal and goes poking around in Ruth’s past. Slowly, Catherine begins to realize she never really knew Ruth at all.

Catherine and the reader are in the same boat: Neither of us knows the real Ruth Sterling. Even though half the book is told through Ruth’s point-of-view, Pekkanen is a master of letting the reader know just enough that she’ll draw the wrong conclusion. Then she drops a twist that leaves you breathless.

My only quibble with the book is that the pacing is a little slow in the beginning, when it seems this book is only about a daughter coming to grips with her mother’s medical diagnosis. But as soon as that first twist hits, the book takes off at a gallop, and the stakes get higher and higher. Both women are highly believable as they engage in a chess game that neither acknowledges. And while some of their actions are questionable, their motives never are.

The only thing that remains constant throughout the book is the question of the inheritable brain disease, and what family members will do to protect each other from it. The nature of the disease, and what constitutes protection, provides that final twist.

This book was nothing like I expected, but I liked trying to figure out how all of the different puzzle pieces fit together. The ending was interesting - just the right amount of resolution and also leaving you with a little bit uncertainty.

I really enjoyed this book, although it took me a bit to get into the plot. Pekkanen’s writing is great, and I really got into the story the more I went along. I will definitely look forward to the next book from this author.
Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for an ARC of this novel!
3.5/5 rounded up

Phew, I really enjoyed this book. I absolutely flew through it; the pace was nonstop but also just right. This was a dual POV of Ruth and Catherine of both the present and past. I was SO excited to see how everything played out and couldn’t think of a better resolution.

I enjoyed this one! It started out slow, but then, all of a sudden, the plot took quite an unexpected turn, and I could not stop reading! The story is told through alternating POVs between Ruth and her daughter, Catherine. I thought the author did a great job with the way Ruth's back story and secrets unfolded.

I thought the plot was original and had good mystery, suspense, and twists! I started reading this one on audio but switched to the physical and found that I enjoyed it much more.

Catherine and her mother, Ruth, have always been a duo. It's always just been the two of them for as long as Catherine can remember. Catherine is on the verge of getting her nursing degree and moving away to start her new life, but her mother wants anything but that. Especially in the area Catherine's planning to move to. In her quest to keep her daughter close, Ruth inevitably makes Catherine start asking questions about her past... and that's not a road Ruth wants to go down. Once Catherine starts connecting the dots and catching pieces of her mother's lies, their lives could change forever.
 
Gone Tonight by Sarah Pekkanen was a really good mystery/thriller. The ending was very unpredictable and those are the best kind! SO many twists and turns, as soon as you think you have it figured out. NOPE. The rug is ripped right out from under you.

With each and every book I read from Sarah Pekkanen, I become further obsessed with her ability to tell a thrilling, psychological story. Her writing is always so spot on and each book once I start it, I don’t won’t to put it down until it’s over.

Gone Tonight is no exception, it sucked me in immediately and I had to know what was at the core of Ruth’s paranoia for her daughter Catherine. I loved the different timelines that give you an earlier Ruth and a present day Ruth. It explains a lot of her behaviors and habits. And overall I just loved the lengths she went through to protect herself and her daughter.

Overall I thought this was a great book/audio and would definitely recommend it to any fan of the authors or any psychological thriller fan in general.

***Thank you Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press for the ARC copy in return for an honest review***

Sarah and Greer were the two authors that started me on thrillers. I was surprised to see a solo book but knew I had to read it. After reading their last book, I couldn't wait for this one. This one was wild. It left me guessing until the very end. Well done.

Absolutely loved this book! Sarah Pekkanen never misses. I've loved all her books with Greer Hendricks and this one was just as brilliant. Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the ARC.

I began reading the e-ARC of this book and finished it on audiobook after publication. Loved Kata Mara’s narration.

This was a wild ride! Just like her other books I have read, SP is a master at pulling you in right from the beginning. And the bits revealed throughout keep you guessing.

Thanks to #NetGalley and the publisher for early access to this book in exchange for an honest review.