This is the second book by Kathy Reichs that I've read. The first was Déjà Dead (Temperance Brennan #1). I really enjoyed both books, however Two Nights has a much different feel to it than Deja Dead. The sentences were short and punchy and gave the pacing a sense of urgency. Sunnie (Sunday Night- the MC) has a harrowing past and was a tough as nails type of character. She started out in a special forces military unit and eventually went on to become a detective. I really loved her dry sense of humor and her passion for the crime she was investigating. I don't want to give anything away, but there's a secondary character in the book named Gus, and I thought he was wonderfully laid back and gave balance to Sunnie's aggressive style.

One of my criticisms of Deja Dead was that we were often given a little too much detail, as to which streets Dr. Brennan was driving on, what she was eating for lunch, etc. We still see some of that peeking through here but it wasn't as prevalent and didn't slow down the story at all. I can see how Reichs writing has matured over time and I appreciated that.

The mystery itself is twisting and turning and the action jumps off almost immediately and doesn't slow down. We see Sunnie use a variety of investigative techniques and travel to several different settings. (The settings were all very different and Reichs nailed the feel of those places.) Sunnie does have a tendency to jump head first into a fight, but we see her safely and smartly navigating obvious danger points which lent credence to her detective background and made her feel real.

My only real criticism is that I think this is not a mystery the reader can solve on their own. The conclusion is reached by knowledge of things the reader isn't otherwise provided with. It doesn't give you the sense that you're actively engaging with the mystery, but taking a more passive role in watching Sunnie solve it. It's a small criticism though, as watching Sunnie and Gus solve it was very entertaining.

I really enjoyed this book and even though it is supposed to be a standalone, I wouldn't mind seeing a few more Sunnie Night books in the future!

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Ballantine Books for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Another great story from Kathy Reichs. Fascinating trying to work out the direction of the story. Lot of great characters and an absorbing storyline

Sunday Night has cut herself off from everyone hiding off by herself with her physical and psychological scars haunting her. But when she is contacted to help and offered quite a bit of money to find a girl that has gone missing after the chaos of a bomb she decides to take the case.

Sunnie finds herself traveling and following the clues to help her solve the questions still being asked of whether the girl was dead or was she taken? During her time Sunnie will need to face her own demons that have been haunting her for the past several years.

Two Nights is my first read by Kathy Reichs who I have been wanting to try reading for quite a while and thought with this being a standalone it would be the perfect time to try her work out. When seeing this book up for review I was quite thrilled to receive a copy and had looked forward to reading it. Unfortunately the book really ended up somewhat a disappointment for me as I really thought I would love it.

My main issue with this book was simply I never really liked the main character at all. I don’t know why but as a flawed character is usually one to become quite attached to but instead I never could connect with Sunnie which just made connecting to everything else going on quite a chore. To be honest by halfway I knew this wasn’t a book for me and began skimming here and there just to finish. The good news for me though now that I’m done is I’m reading how this is so different from the normal Kathy Reichs works that I’ll still give her another shot sometime and chalk it up to just not connecting with this particular story.

I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

Two Nights is a suspense novel centered around Sunday "Sunnie" Night, a troubled woman with a horrific past that she does her best to never remember. She is yanked out of her recluse lifestyle by a case that tugs at her childhood memories, and once she begins investigating she refuses to stop until she has gotten to the bottom of the whole mess, even if it sparks recollections she would rather forget. While the story is not bad, I couldn't really get attached to any of the characters. Additionally, it was lacking in the science tidbits that I expect and enjoy in Kathy Reichs books. If there is a sequel I will probably read it, but will not be waiting at the edge of my seat for it to be released.

Sunday Night is a former policewoman, damaged physically and emotionally from events initially unknown to the reader. She lives alone in a small shack on a sparsely inhabited island off the Charleston SC shore. At night she locks doors, but it seems most of the demons are still within. A former colleague and mentor visits her with a case of a missing girl. Beau believes Sunday needs to get involved not only to find the girl, but perhaps herself. Curious but cautious Sunday enters a world of fanaticism and danger, a world that she had hoped she had left behind.

Settings range from South Carolina, Chicago and LA. People ranged from the rich, desperate and violent. Sunday hopes for an outcome against all odds with some help from unexpected sources. Rules are bent and almost broken. This was the first Kathy Reich book I read, so unlike other reviewers who have read the Temperance Brennan series, I easily embraced an edgy, tough, sarcastic and smart character.
Sunday persists driven by both her past and the hope of finding the young girl. I was up all night for Sunday Night with the hope that she will return for another adventure.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for an opportunity to review this exciting book.

Enjoyed the style this book Two Nights by Kathy Reichs was written with. I didn't expect the twist at the end.

Two things stuck out to me after reading this: the 1 dimensional, painfully stereotypical characters and the lackluster plot. It felt as though the author used a political message as the foundation and devised a weak and shaky plot around it-- one of my greatest pet peeves! I was racing to the end, not because I cared about what happened to the characters, but because I couldn't wait to finish and put this book behind me once and for all.

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher. I requested this from Net Galley because it sounded interesting. I've never read anything by this author before, so it was also a chance to explore a writer who is not new to writing, but who was new to me.

I have to say up front that I'm not a huge fan of first person voice novels, which automatically puts private investigator stories off limits since pretty much every author in that genre seems obsessed with writing them exactly the same way as every other author. This means of course that once you've read one you've effectively read them all.

These old soft slippers of stories doubtlessly appeal to a certain segment of the population who like to slip them on regularly, but it's like those authors have never considered that it might appeal to a larger audience if they could only find the courage to break the mold. I know it's always easy to play it safe, but I'd have appreciated this one a lot more had it not done so.

I've never read anything by this author before (and seriously doubt I will again), and the blurb made it sound like this might be interesting, assuming I could get past 1PoV. I'm always game for a good story involving a strong female lead, so: an author who might be able to carry a first person story and not make it irritating to read? Potential strong female character? Maybe this wouldn't be so bad? Those were my hopes going in.

Let me begin by saying that I did appreciate that the first person PoV wasn't as annoying as I feared it would be, although it did still kick me out of suspension of disbelief on occasion, and it did still annoy me from time to time. The main reason for that is that 1PoV is always about 'me' (the story-teller) all the time. You cannot get away from 'me': Hey lookit me! Look at what I'm doing now! Pay attention only to me! Now I'm doing something else! Look now! Annoying.

I honestly don't know how people can swallow so much of that. I'm amazed that they can, but herding animals can be habituated to anything, so I guess the same principle applies here. The real problem though is that it's the weakest voice in which to tell any story, let alone a PI adventure, because nothing can happen unless the 'me' is present to witness it! How unlikely is that? The only way to overcome that severe limitation is to have more than one first person voice which is even more annoying, or to have boring info-dumps periodically so the first person narrator can catch up on things which happened when they were not there. Again: annoying.

The amusing thing here was that the author openly admitted what a mistake it was to have limited herself to this voice because she added third person PoV 'mini-chapters' periodically. I quickly took to skipping those because I found them to be thoroughly uninformative and worse, they were nothing more than info-dumps which repeatedly stalled the story while contributing nothing materially to it.

This novel was not quite ready for prime time, which in some ways is understandable since it was an ARC. There was a spelling error of the kind a spellchecker will not find: "reversals that left a bade taste" where evidently 'bad' was required instead of 'bade', and having someone say, “Thus his interested in Baltimore, New York, and Louisville" when the 'his' should have been 'is', or alternately, the 'interested' should have been 'interest'.

There were occasional punctuation issues, such as, for example, a period missing at the end of a sentence, or a question mark (example: "He was taller than Capps, but who wasn’t.") and so on. This could use another read-through before publishing, but we've all been there and all missed something before publication, so these were no big deal for me. Other than that, it was generally well-formatted and in technical terms, well-written. The problem with it for me came from mired-in-the-mud trope and cliché. The farce was strong with this one.

Far from take a road less traveled, the author instead apparently made a checklist of tropes and clichés from the genre which must be included, and she checked off every one:

First person voice? Check!
Quirky name for female PI? Check! (It's Sunday Night which is too absurd by 100%)
Thorny PI or with troubled history or both? Check!
PI likes typically male sport (baseball in this case)? Check!
Quirky pet? Check!
Too much focus on, and detail of, ordinary everyday activities in life of PI? Check!
Has relative or close friend for backup? Check!
Has previous career in military or police? Check!
Has questionable record in previous professional career? Check!
Masochistic PI likes to suffer? Check!
Drinks beer like a good old boy? Check!
Investigation seems to be going one way; then it gets turned around and goes in another way entirely? Check!

So nothing new here then. I was truly sorry to see that.

There were also some writerly issues creeping in, such as having a character say, “Against whom?” No one says that in real life unless they're being very pretentious, or are an English teacher or an old-school actor, but I see writers using it all the time in character speech because they can't stop themselves! Personally I think 'whom' is long past its sell-by date and ought to be tossed out altogether. If writers want to use it in the narration, that's one thing, but to have real people actually say it is entirely another, and this is another problem with first person voice: the narrator is the one actually saying it!

So that's the technical writing portion of the review dealt with. Now onto the story itself! It didn't work for me because it revolved around a kidnapping of a young girl. The problem with this is that there was absolutely no rational whatsoever for kidnapping the girl, and even less to keep her alive. There's some vague hand-waving about using her for leverage, but it fails because there's nothing to leverage.

The bad guys are terrorists, so the kidnap victim is completely irrelevant to them. The terrorist leader is utterly ruthless and has no compunction about killing children, yet the one thing he threatens to do - kill the child - he never does.

The sole reason for this is of course so the PI can heroically rescue the girl at the end, but this makes the story so unrealistic as to be more of a joke than a thriller. I don't mind somewhat improbable events occurring in a novel if there's some sort of justification for them within the context of the story, but to just randomly have things be 'just-so' for the sole purpose of facilitating the PI cracking the case and saving the day makes the story look poorly written.

It didn't get any better when the PI takes a shot to the shoulder. There is a dumb gunfight in which, like Han Solo in the original film, she doesn't shoot first even though any realistic PI would have done so. She waits out the potential assassin who is in her hotel room. She waits for an ungodly amount of time, and never once thinks to call the police. Dumb. Worse than this, a host of other hotel guests go past her and see she has a gun, yet not a single one of them calls the police either! Double dumb. She's hit in the shoulder and gets a prescription for painkiller, but she never fills it! This doesn't make her look tough. It makes her look stupid.

If there was some valid reason offered for not getting the script filled - like she was in a prolongued chase, or there was no time to get to the pharmacy for some other reason, that would be one thing, but there's nothing! She has lots of time and nothing pressing, and she's out on the streets a lot. It would have been the simplest thing in the world to drop in to a pharmacy, get the script filed, pop a pill, and fix the pain, thereby making her more effective at doing the job she was hired for, but she never does. This doesn't make her look strong, it makes her look dumb or clueless. But not to worry! The entire injury seems to magically go away in short order, and isn't mentioned again - not in the portion I read, anyway.

What killed this novel for me though, was when the 'ruthless' villain kills one of two followers to try and get the PI off his back, but he delivers the other one to her trussed-up as a prisoner. Why didn't he kill that one? It turns out that the only reason he didn't dispatch her as well, is that she had a vital clue to impart which enabled the PI to track down the villain. This was so ridiculous that I quit reading the story right there, at about 75% in. I could not enjoy it when it was written so poorly, and I certainly couldn't take it seriously. I expected a lot better than this from such a seasoned writer. I cannot recommend this novel.

This is a very good mystery and I sell a lot of her books in my bookstore. This is a stand alone novel and is not part of her series books

I have read several otters by this author and this might be one of the best that I have read. Loved the main character and the ending that I did not expect. The book was hard to put down!

This latest work by Kathy Reichs features Sunnie Night, a former member of the military and police officer with a very sordid past. She is spending her life in quiet seclusion in South Carolina when she's provided the opportunity to solve a case involving a missing girl and a bombing. The book focuses on her expeditions as she tries to solve this case with flashbacks to her very messed up childhood interspersed. It brings in themes that are very real in today's society. This was the first book I've read by this infamous author who penned the books that the show Bones was based on. I wasn't really that impressed with the book. Sure, Sunnie has her special features as a character - missing an eye, screwed up past that's left some deep scars - but I really felt like I didn't get a chance to know who she is inside and why she made certain decisions. Because of this, I had a hard time connecting with her. I found the pace to be really slow for the first half of the book. Overall, the case itself was interesting, and I thought there was promise in this new character when I first starting reading the book, but found it fell short.

Sunday Night is a tough and damaged woman. Once a police officer, she now lives as a recluse on an island. A friend asks her to take on a case of a missing girl whose family was killed in a bomb attack about a year earlier. The grandmother wants vengeance for those who killed her daughter, grandson and maybe granddaughter. The search takes Sunday across the nation, where she has to defend herself against some dangerous people.

I enjoyed this standalone novel from Kathy Reichs. It was intense and moving and I could feel the trauma Sunday is going through; both past and present. I would read another story Sunday Night to learn more about her.

Fans of Kathy Reich will enjoy this stand alone thriller with a strong female heroine is the main character.

Kathy Reichs--author of the Temperance Brennan “Bones” series--has written a stand-alone, noir-ish PI story featuring a damaged heroine a la Lisbeth Salander. Sunday “Sunnie” Night is an angry, impetuous, scarred (literally and figuratively) military veteran, whose subsequent career in law enforcement came to an end after a questionable shooting. Still suffering from flashbacks of Helmand Province, Sunnie’s coping strategy is to need no one and feel nothing. She’s lost 30% of her vision and experiences recurring shoulder pain. Instead of a cat named Birdie, she has a squirrel named Bob for a pet at her cabin on a remote island.

Sunnie’s former mentor recommends her to Opaline Drucker, a proud Charleston dowager, whose daughter and grandson were killed during a domestic terrorist attack. Her granddaughter, Stella, disappeared in the melee. It is unknown whether Stella is dead or alive. Opaline wants Sunnie to bring the perpetrators to justice and discover what happened to her granddaughter.

Sunnie begrudgingly accepts the assignment, largely because of demons in her own past. What ensues is a lively chase from one coast to the other as Sunnie tracks down first one, then another, of the terrorist cell, all the while unable to confirm Stella’s whereabouts.

There is no forensic or scientific analysis here. At times the chase got a bit exhausting, and I yearned for a sedentary laboratory scene. Nevertheless, Reich’s exploration of the link between religious fanaticism and violence kept the novel timely and fresh. I wouldn’t mind seeing future installments of Sunnie Night.

Thanks to Netgally, the publisher and Kathy Reichs, I received an advanced copy of this book.

Former military and police, Sunday "Sunnie" Night now spends most of her days as a recluse living on a small SC island. Still coming to grips from her tragic past and an injury to her eye that forced her retirement, Sunnie likes the quiet life. When a pal drops an offer on her plate -a wealthy woman searching for her missing granddaughter - Sunnie accepts the job. The case reminds her too much of her past.

Sunnie begins a cross-country hunt that has her fighting for her life and dealing with drudged up memories of her past. Is the granddaughter still alive? Can Sunnie find her?

I really enjoyed the book. It was so different from the Tempe Brennan books and I liked that. It was dark, but I couldn't put it down. I thought Sunnie was such a badass. I hope there's more books in the future.

Sunday Night is a former police officer who has spent most of her adult life running from her past and living as a hermit. Her foster father talks her into taking a year old cold case involving a missing teenager. Sunday agrees and flies out to Chicago where the bombing occurred and where the teenager disappeared. Sunday recruits her brother to help her and they stumble into more deaths and more impending tragedies.

I really liked this story. It is very different from Kathy Reichs usual style. It had a lot of action. I found Sunday to be an interesting character but felt it took to long in the book for me to fully understand her past. But overall really good book. I received an advance copy from netgalley for review.

I love the Bones series and so I had no trouble reviewing this new stand alone novel. I thought the writing was fine, but the characters were very rough around the edges. The introduction jumped right into the story without much, well, introduction. I couldn't figure out of the narrator was male or female. The setting seemed a little farfetched, as far as the main character living on an isolated island, rather than just being isolated emotionally.

An addictive story with a twisted and hilariously funny sense of humor. Sunday Night used to be a cop. Something bad happened and she is now retired. She is sucked into "one last job" that she can't turn down because it resonates with her own mysterious backstory. This is all pretty typical and there are a million noir novels like this. But right off the bat, the story turns the tropes upside down with an original and fresh take. Yes, Sunday is damaged, but she shows it on her disfigured face. She is strong, so strong... one might call her a bad@ss. She is smart, resourceful and the kind of detective that can outwit even the worst of the bad guys. She is paranoid but, considering someone may be out to get her, she is justified. The story is very entertaining and easy to read. And Sunday is simply fantastic. Her voice is so compelling, pessimistic but willing to fight for what she thinks is right, even if she doesn't fool herself into thinking that everything will be OK. An excellent, five star read.

This was such a good book. Sunnie Night is hired to locate the men that killed her client's daughter and grandson, and possibly locate her missing Granddaughter. Sunnier has some issues. She was severely wounded while a police officer. She lives on a tiny island with few inhabitants. She is close to being a recluse.
Sunnie is a very interesting and complex character. She has a very tragic past. The details come out slowly. There is a lot of twists and turns.
****I voluntarily reviewed and gave my honest opinion of this Advanced Readers Copy of this
book from NetGalley****