Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this eARC.

In “Burn This Night,” Alex Kenna crafts a gripping mystery that intertwines the lives of two women, each grappling with their own demons and secrets. The novel’s protagonist, Kate Myles, is a struggling private investigator whose world is turned upside down when she discovers that her late father isn’t her biological dad. This revelation sets her on a path to uncovering a decades-old murder mystery, while simultaneously being drawn into a recent arson case in a small town.

Kenna’s storytelling shines through her use of alternating timelines, which adds depth and complexity to the narrative. The transitions between past and present are seamless, keeping readers engaged and eager to piece together the puzzle alongside Kate. The character of Kate Myles is particularly compelling; her determination to seek the truth, despite her personal turmoil, makes her a relatable and admirable heroine.

The secondary storyline follows Abby Coburn, a social work student trying to help her brother Jacob, whose meth addiction has led him down a dark path. Abby’s tragic death in a fire, which also claims the lives of two others, becomes the catalyst for Kate’s investigation. The small-town setting is rich with secrets, and Kenna masterfully unravels these layers, revealing the dark underbelly of seemingly idyllic surroundings.

Kenna’s background as a prosecutor adds authenticity to the procedural aspects of the investigation, while her skill as a storyteller ensures that the plot is full of unexpected twists and turns. The emotional depth of the characters, particularly Kate and Abby, is a standout feature, making the reader invested in their journeys.

“Burn This Night” is a must-read for fans of mysteries and thrillers. It’s a story about family, identity, and the lengths one will go to uncover the truth. Kenna’s ability to blend suspense with emotional resonance makes this novel a standout in the genre. Whether you’re a seasoned mystery reader or new to the genre, “Burn This Night” promises to keep you on the edge of your seat.

This has everything you look for in a mystery novel. It had suspense, twists, was heart felt and you were drawn in by her characters.

A mystery written by a former detective - this story was written form her personal experience becoming addicted to painkillers after injury. It speaks to pain, loss and the human mind.

Sometimes this book feels like two-in-one with the way it blends together different elements. I had no idea which direction this would take despite my best guesses. I enjoyed the ending thoroughly and enjoyed seeing the two plot lines come together.

Thank you Netgalley for the copy of this book in advance and allowing me to read it and give my thoughts!

This is the first book that I have read by this author, and I really enjoyed it. It kept my attention throughout the whole book and had just the right amount of twists and turns.

I would recommend this book to anyone who likes thrillers/mysteries

Alex Kenna’s Kate Myles is the most compelling, vividly imagined P.I. hero since Charles Willeford’s Hoke Moseley. A self-described “pathologically messy ex-cop-turned-private-eye with flaming ADHD,” Kate is also a recovering drug addict, and a single-mom desperately trying to regain custody of her young daughter. Temporarily house-less and living with her mom, Kate is unhappy and adrift. So, when a diabolically complex murder case comes her way (actually, a double-murder-mystery case), with the chance to escape L.A. for the idyllic setting of a California mountain town, she jumps at it. She soon finds herself caught up in a web of deceit and violence going back decades, as well as meeting a kind, unassuming local man to whom she is powerfully attracted.

Like Kenna’s first novel, Burn this Night works on many levels. It’s got mystery, romance, suspense, and some moving, realistically messy family drama. It’s also funny as hell.

I really enjoyed how fast paced this book was! So many twists and turns, I felt like I was a private investigator myself reading this. Also, the story really comes together at the end, so just be patient while reading!

This book involves 2 of my favorite topics. DNA and genealogy. I loved it and couldn't put it down. Small town vibe with a lot of secrets.

Amazing book. Kinda hard to see the point in all the narrators until the end. The family dynamic and connection was brilliant. However I found her ex to be entirely too pretentious and the wife was too much. However the plot and mystery themselves were well planned and thought out.

A really good, well thought out thriller with a good twist and fast paced plot.
Kate is a good lead character and I enjoyed learning about her back story and her many flaws which made her stand out.
Two events ran alongside each other in this book, eventually connecting in a natural way.
Easy to read, with no let up, I will read more from this Author.

What a great book! So many twists and turns. So many different things going on that end up intertwining. If you like a good mystery, give this book a read. You won't regret it.

I loved Kate, she was a bad ass even thought she was struggling with very real problems. It even made her more likable that she wasn't perfect. I also loved the before chapters and every time one came up my skin prickled.

Great story that just gets better with the turn of each page. I read this as a stand-alone and found that I wasn’t missing anything by doing so.

After an accident that left Kate addicted to painkillers and alcohol, she needed something to occupy her mind and keep her sober, so she accepted a job as a private investigator. She needed to solve a cold case in order to solve the crime she was hired to do, and she finds herself mired in secrets and family drama. But Kate has her own agenda and her own secrets to keep.

This story is told in dual timelines and has very well rounded characters, especially Kate. The wind-up to the end was fantastic. I can easily recommend this book to those of you who enjoy crime thrillers and mysteries. Thank you, NetGalley and Crooked Lane books for the ARC.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC!

I didn't realise that there were other books in this series - I genuinely thought this was a standalone book. It follows Kate, a detective, doing her best to work out two murders with the clock ticking. Kate is a genuinely good character, with realistic flaws and an interesting backstory.

I will say that it did feel a bit confused in parts about what story it wanted to tell, There's two distinct plots, which is interesting, but they do tend to get a little muddled, and sometimes it feels like the actual mystery takes a backseat to the family drama that it is caught up in. There was also perhaps one too many twists in the narrative.

All in all, this is a good cosy mystery novel with interesting characters and plot, and well worth a read.

Wow this book brilliant. The plot of this book was absolutely great. Rollercoaster of a book. Read the book quickly trough from beginning to end. Book is very gripping.

Kate Myles hasn't had it easy - dismissed from the police, divorced, separated from her family. Then, she discovers the truth about her biological father, which follows with her relation to an uncaught killer from decades ago. As she tries to find out the truth about him, she takes on the work as an investigator for a family murder that occurred in the same little town. Through a journey of self-discovery and deceit on every corner, will Kate manage to solve the cases and uncover the truth, or will she fall prey to the killer herself?

Having read the previous book by Alex Kenna, I had an overall idea of the style of writing and storytelling, however, I ended up enjoying this book way more.

Although starting quite slowly, however, amid huge news, I was not initially fully invested in the story, but it picked up quite fast. The plot ended up being shocking, full of red herrings, and many plot twists, keeping the reader fully engaged.

I found the storytelling to be done really well, getting into many characters, their personalities and motivations, which really added a lot to the story itself. The final plot twist was really shocking for me, as I genuinely didn't expect how it would all turn out.

The book combines three perspectives - of Kate, of Abby, and of Jacob, which all mix together to create a fuller story and add background to the events that happened. I found the mixing very interesting and tried to figure out the story myself. It also kept you in suspense for a good portion of the book.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book and all its plot twists. It was a good and engaging read, that I would recommend.

4/5 stars.

THANK YOU CROOKED LANE BOOKS AND NETGALLEY FOR PROVIDING ME WITH A DIGITAL COPY OF THIS BOOK.

A fast paced thriller, I read this is one day! I give it 4/5 stars! Retired cop Kate Myles is sucked into a decades old case while also trying to exonerate a brother of his sisters death. She gets caught up in love, in drama, and in the hands of the killer. Will Kate be okay?

Such a great thriller! It kept me engaged and I could not put it down! I liked the dual timelines!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this arc in exchange for an honest review!

Gripping!!! I read this as a stand-alone with no issue. I really enjoyed reading it and didn’t want to put it down. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this ARC!

Burn This Night by Alex Kenna is a mystery written from the perspective of a former police detective who was hurt on the job and became addicted to painkillers. It is an all too realistic scenario where she lost her husband and custody of her daughter.

We come in as she is picking up the pieces and has become a private investigator. Luckily for her she still has some friends in law enforcement who are giving her work. One of her former colleagues named Harry has a case for her as she discovers that her newly deceased father may not have been her biological father. Her mother is not talking and the situation messes with her head, a lot.

Along the way, she wants to know more about herself and sends her DNA out to a genealogy company, which leads to some interesting and confusing results.

Burn This Night is almost like two books in one, it is unpredictable and keeps readers’ attention. There are elements of new technology, old technology and using clues to solve murders. It is hard to put down.

Burn This Night by Alex Kenna gripped me from page one. I did not read the first book in this series, but I didn't feel I missed out on too much. Burn This Night could be read as a standalone book.

Burn This Night is told in alternating timelines about a private investigator and her quest for answers. The story is full of family secrets and lots of twists and turns to keep the reader guessing and turning the pages.

A solid mystery with interesting and flawed characters. I would recommend this book.

#BurnthisNight #NetGalley @crookedlanebks

Mired in the midst of an emotional minefield, Los Angeles private investigator Kate Myles struggles to gain control of her thoughts and emotions while trying to solve two murders, one recent and the other decades old, in a town full of dark secrets before she becomes the next victim.

The life of Kate Myles is a hot mess. “I’m a pathologically messy ex-cop-turned-private-eye with flaming ADHD.”

After an on-duty vehicle accident while she was a cop left her with a debilitating spinal injury and an addiction to prescription painkillers, her ex-husband John divorced her and gained custody of their daughter Amelia. Free of her opiate addiction, Kate is determined to control her drinking and to get her life in order so she can battle for the custody of her daughter. The last thing Kate needs is having her world upended again by the accidental discovery her dad was not her dad. She learns her mother had conceived her with help from a fertility clinic and an anonymous sperm donor. The family history she had grown up with was mostly fiction.

When her mother refuses to talk about it beyond sharing a few basic facts, reeling from the discovery, Kate turns to a genealogy website in desperation to learn something about her paternal genetic background. There she discovers two possible distant cousins and reaches out to them.

It turns out a possible male cousin is not a relative at all, but a sheriff’s department homicide investigator who had submitted a suspect’s DNA to the website hoping to solve a twenty-year-old murder case. Knowing the investigator, Kate agrees to meet with him and his partner. They convince her to help them with the case when they sweeten the deal by getting her a paying job to investigate a recent murder in the same town where the cold case murder they are investigating occurred. Kate moves temporarily to a rental cabin in Idlewood, a picturesque mountain resort town an hour and half from Los Angeles that she had visited many times as a child on family vacations.

In Idlewood, Kate meets her client, an attorney representing the family of a woman recently murdered, when an arsonist set fire to her home. Both the family and the attorney seem convinced the victim’s brother, Jacob Coburn, who the police have already arrested, is the killer. Kate’s job is to prove Jacob’s meth addiction and existing mental illness triggered a psychotic breakdown that caused him to kill his sister so that a court might sentence him to a psychiatric facility instead of prison.

While investigating the recent murder, Kate also works on the cold case homicide as she continues battling her personal demons, including the struggle to make sense of things surrounding her true heritage. She combs the area for possible relatives, partly as an integral part of unraveling the truth about the twenty-year-old-murder, but also hoping to find answers to her own questions and maybe even her biological father, although she isn’t certain how far down the rabbit hole it will all take her. Then, as the investigations progress, things take a sinister and dangerous turn.

Burn This Night is a fast-paced detective mystery that, besides crime, explores themes of disillusionment, family, heartbreak of betrayal, identity crisis, and isolation. The plot is intelligent, and the dialogue is sharp.

Kate Myles is a complex character. Here she continues the struggle to rebound from the fallout from her failed marriage, opioid addiction, and alcohol abuse, the issues she battled in Kenna’s debut novel, What Meets the Eye, where we first met Kate.

The complexity of the character derives from a dichotomy. We sometimes see Kate as the prototypical strong, independent female protagonist we’ve come to expect in contemporary fiction, someone we can admire and root for. At other times, she seems to occupy such a knife edge of emotional vulnerability that she seems in constant danger of falling completely apart. Here, it’s hard to feel anything more than sympathy for Kate, and she doesn’t seem very heroic. “My muscles felt jerky and my vision blurred. I was breathing fast, like I was trying to outrun someone. Feeling like I might throw up, I pulled over by the side of the road, leaned over, and rested my hands on my thighs. The sun beat down on my back as I breathed in the hot, syrupy air.”

Despite the pronounced contradictions of her nature, Kate is never off-putting. It’s what makes her seem like a real person and allows us to connect with her on an emotive level. Her thoughts and actions make sense in the given situations she faces.

Kenna tells the story in alternating timelines and with alternating first-person narrators. Besides Kate as the primary narrator, Kenna puts us into the heads of the recent murder victim, Abby Coburn (before her death), her sister Grace, and their brother Jacob. This gives the reader valuable insight needed into the story and helps acquaint us with these other main supporting characters. It also helps us understand the dynamics of the Coburn family, an integral part of the story. A detective mystery is only as good as its characters. This one has got some great ones.

Kenna set a high bar with her Kate Myles debut novel, What Meets the Eye. This often makes it hard to to satisfy the high expectations of readers with a second novel. But that’s not a problem here. As much as I liked the first book, I enjoyed this one even more because of the continued transformation of Kate Myles over the course of this second story.

Burn This Night delivers a near pitch perfect plot, we’ve got characters to care about, and the unique Kate Myles’ identity crisis piece and a little romance combine to make the book unexpectedly uplifting. Mystery, Detective & Suspense readers are going to leave satisfied. I certainly did, and look forward to meeting Kate Myles again.