I have read every book by the author and will continue to do so.

This is a slow-burning family drama with a little action at the end. The book alternates between an overbearing mother, Ruth, and her independent daughter, Catherine.
The book opens with Ruth slowly losing her memory. Catherine has always found her mother to be clingy, but she is now questioning if Ruth is faking her illness to keep her close especially since she is moving away.
Catherine begins digging into her mother's past to find out what she's been hiding. In the Ruth chapters, we learn about her childhood and why she has no friends or family. It all comes to an anti-climatic end.

I liked this book but wanted more. I liked Ruth's chapters but Catherine's fell a bit flat for me.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for sending a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Ruth has been protecting her daughter all of her life, but now the secrets are slowing starting to come out. While Catherine is trying to seemingly help her mother, Ruth, she discovers that she has been keeping secrets from her, not knowing how dangerous finding out the truth could be.

This is a fast, paced page turner that keeps you on the edge of your seat. A great plot with many twists and turns to keep you guessing.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in return for my honest review.

A fascinating book that combines themes of health and mother-daughter relationships and twists them up with a thriller that kept me guessing until the end. I sincerely didn’t see it coming.

Ruth is a single mother whose family has “thrown her out” when she becomes pregnant with her beloved daughter, Catherine. Ruth moves away and sacrifices everything for her daughter, working low paying jobs, foregoing education, and relationships of her own to assure her daughter is safe and happy.

Catherine is a nurse with big plans, ready to get on with her new career and life when a diagnosis blindsides her plans. That diagnosis whets Catherine’s appetite to know more about the family she shares with her mother, and her investigation threatens more than exposing her mother’s secrets.

Another creative and exciting thriller by Sarah Pekkanen! Don’t miss it!

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the ARC. The book went on sale on August 1, 2023.

Gone Tonight was weird and unexpected, but also really enjoyable. Pekkanen does a great job with domestic drama, and this is no exception.

I loved this book. All the secrets, and the mother-daughter drama. Sarah did an outstanding job with it all.

I am sorry to say this one was not for me. It was a slow burn that I had a hard time getting into.
Thank you Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC for an honest review.

Thanks to St. Martin’s Press, the author, and NetGalley for the free gifted copy in exchange for an honest review.

A thrilling read, it was fast-paced and had lots of interesting twists and turns. Catherine is very close with her mother but all of a sudden things are not what they seem, which leads to some drama and a dual POV adds to the layers of this as it plays out.

Overall a great thriller but I definitely felt like the ending could have been more shocking, by the very end you knew what was going to happen since the crazy stuff happened in the middle - I was almost waiting for another shoe to drop.

I would definitely recommend this fast-paced thriller, for a dual POV and lots of smaller twists and turns throughout, a great fall read.

I would love to read Sarah’s other books, and can’t wait to see what she writes in the future.

It seems like Ruth and her daughter Catherine are close. It's always been the two of them, even as they've frequently moved around and Ruth has kept much of her past from her daughter. But as Catherine prepares to move away for the first time, Ruth feels panic at the thought of her daughter being apart from her, and their careful little world starts to crumble.

This fast-paced thriller is easy to read, with short chapters that tell us both Catherine and Ruth's point of view, but kept me waiting for a bigger twist that never came. Most of the surprises were pretty obvious. And while I know we needed drama for the story to move forward, I am not a fan of books where being honest would have just saved everyone most of the trouble! Ugh, just don't keep giant life changing secrets that affect everyone's safety, folks.

Pekkanen excels at writing "creepy," so you can't help but turn the pages and feel like something bad is going to happen. There are some eerie personalities at play here. I just wish things were a little more exciting and less predictable.

Gone Tonight is a story of a mother that will do anything to protect her daughter... that is if it means not being honest or telling the truth.

Ruth is the tough as nails mother who has been through the trials and tribulations and has overcome them all. However, Ruth's past is one she longs for as much as it is one that she has tried to run from. Her story starts long before Catherine was born and is sprinkled with confused love and teenage drama.

Don't let this make you believe that Gone Tonight is a fluff and filler kind of tail of a single mom and her daughter struggling to survive. While Ruth is surviving she makes the reader understand she by no means is struggling. Sure her life isn't perfect or what she would anticipate but she does whatever she can to protect Catherine from the terrors of her past.

As the story continues Catherine begins to realize that her mother may not be who she says she is. Catherine decides it is up to her to uncover the past and secrets her mother is not so willing to reveal. As Catherine goes deeper down the rabbit hole of her mother's past she uncovers that all that she knew of her mother was a lie.

Ruth had her reason. In Gone Tonight as the reader continues to learn more about Ruth and Catherine the reader cannot help to understand why Ruth did what she did. Who could blame her when it comes to protecting your child?

I can mention that this story does have references of teenage rape and pregnant runaways but in the end it all comes together. The final chapters are slightly bittersweet but isn't life as it is somewhat of the same?

It was nice to see Pekkanen taking a unique direction in her writing and to come away from her usual flavor while still staying in the suspense and thriller classification. I would certainly recommend this and it was an enjoyable read. Until next time, Happy Reading!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

I have loved everything this author has written and this is no exception. It’s a story about and mother and daughter that has lived under the radar for years. They have had to pick up and move at a moments notice many times. The daughter has never understood why. Now that she is older, she begins to start looking into it. But, is she putting them in danger? 👀

This was a good book, a thriller with a premise I hadn't read before which is refreshing and I also liked the ambiguity of who was really the worse person, what is any of us capable.of? What makes someone bad or good?

What a great book about a mother/daughter relationship that is so much more than the reader suspects at the start. I had read about early onset Alzheimer's quite a few years ago when I read a book that literally changed my life called [book:Still Alice|2153405] by [author:Lisa Genova|978484], so when I read that Ruth Sterling, the mother in this story had the same disease I felt so bad for her and I knew what Catherine, her daughter, must be going through to live with the knowledge of her mother (and Catherine, the only two in their family) would be living with the rest of Ruth's life.

But, when Catherine's mother tells her that her own mother also had Alzheimer's, Catherine was concerned that it would be coming for her too. She felt that her mother was too private, held back a lot of things, and she began to dig for answers. What she found was definitely nothing she was expecting to find! Her mother, who HATED lying, actually had lied about a lot of things. Catherine was bound and determined to get to the truth of everything.

Thank you to Netgalley and the Publisher for this Advanced Readers Copy of Gone Tonight by Sarah Pekkanen!

This is the first solo Sarah Pekkanen book I've read and I really enjoyed it! I've written a couple of the books she co-authored and it was cool to see the influence she contributed to those books. My biggest complaint about this is that I had a bit of a hard time figuring out who we were following in some of the POVs, but that could absolutely be a me problem. I really enjoyed that we learned things as the characters were experiencing them/learning them themselves, it never felt like info-dumps. This book is not specifically horror but the actual horror scenes were really well done! I definitely would check out other mystery/thrillers this author writes if they're as dark as this!

Gone Tonight
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Author: Sarah Pekkanen

I requested a digital advanced readers copy from NetGalley, St. Martin’s Press and Macmillan Audio and providing my opinion voluntarily and unbiased.

Synopsis: Catherine Sterling thinks she knows her mother. Ruth Sterling is quiet, hardworking, and lives for her daughter. All her life, it's been just the two of them against the world. But now, Catherine is ready to spread her wings, move from home, and begin a new career. And Ruth Sterling will do anything to prevent that from happening. Ruth Sterling thinks she knows her daughter. Catherine would never rebel, would never question anything about her mother's past or background. But when Ruth's desperate quest to keep her daughter by her side begins to reveal cracks in Ruth's carefully constructed world, both mother and daughter begin a dance of deception. No one can know Ruth's history. There is a reason why Ruth kept them moving every few years, and why she was ready—in a moment's notice—to be gone in the night. But danger is closing in. Is it coming from the outside, from Ruth's past? Is Ruth reaching a breaking point? Or is the danger coming from the darkness that may live in Catherine, herself?

My Thoughts: Pekkanen is known to team up with Greer Hendricks delivering masterful psychological thrillers but is solo this time, which did not disappoint. This one is a masterpiece, its compelling, twisty, slow-burning character development, apt tension, and a carefully constructed plot. This thriller grabbed my attention from the start and kept me fully invested into the very end. This is one of the better thrillers I have read in recent months. This story is divided into three carefully constructed acts that create a web of twists, the darkness that can reside in a person’s soul, and the very depths that a mother will go to protect their child, no matter how old the child is. The center of the book is Catherine and her mother Ruth, dealing with a possible Alzheimer’s disorder, their relationship is co-dependent, a bit dysfunctional, and at times, obsessive. Catherine cancels her plans to relocate to Boston to help her mother. Catherine soon realizes that her mother has spun her own web of dark secrets that slowly come to light. Will they all unravel?

The premise was original and I have not read before. The story is narrated in alternative perspectives. Our protagonists are unreliable. Catherine is focused, trusting, and concerned about a possible Alzheimer’s diagnosis for her mother, what it would mean if her mother is diagnosed. Ruth is secretive, extremely dependent upon Catherine, and has built up a life based on a false set of facts. When Catherine starts to unravel the family secrets, she finds more than she can imagine. The characters were created with depth, mystery, and intriguing. The author’s writing style was complex, multifaceted, suspenseful, twisty, and just brilliant. The author’s pace and flow of the story is spot on and delivers the plot in twisty layers, some were predictable but a few I did not see coming, and thrilling, exciting suspenseful tension.

The story initially presents more contemporary and then a twist is revealed and it slides into excellent thriller territory. I had the pleasure of having the audiobook and digital book. The narrator was absolutely fantastic, the voice variation was spot on, she really brought these characters from the pages to our minds. This thriller was compelling, captivating, gripping, on the edge of your seat read. Once I started, I devoured in less than 48 hours. I highly recommend picking up this book, or any of their works.

Wow! This book really makes you question just how far a parent is willing to go to protect their child.

Catherine Sterling is ready to begin a new career in a new city, but that means leaving the only parent she’s ever known. Ruth Sterling loves her daughter, but she’s not quite ready to be an empty nester. These two women think they know one another, but their secrets would make it appear as though they were mere strangers. Ruth’s desperation to keep her daughter by her side begins to backfire, and her carefully-constructed world starts to crumble, putting both of their lives in danger.

I thought this was a fantastic thriller! This is the first solo book I’ve read by Sarah Pekkanen, and I think she hit this one out of the ballpark. It’s not often that I find my jaw dropping multiple times throughout a story, but the twists just kept on coming. Definitely a unique and engaging storyline that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Highly recommend!

*Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for providing a copy of this book to review.*

This book was okay. It was a slow start for me when I initially picked it up last month, so I decided to put it on pause and come back when I could dive into it a little better. I'm glad I did that, because I enjoyed it much more when I picked it up the second time around.

I think what would help readers interested in checking this book out is to suspend belief that this is a page-turning, suspense-gripping thriller. Knowing this was written by Pekkanen, one half of the amazing duo thriller team, Hendricks and Pekkanen, we are all familiar with, I went in thinking it would be similar to books I've read by them in the past. It was a slower burn to me. The writing is impeccable. No doubt about that! Pekkanen can write.

Once I changed my mindset of what this book was going to be like, I did enjoy it for the most part. I just like a quicker pace to keep me captivated. Despite the pacing, the twists were great and helped me continue with the book. I really enjoyed the journal excerpts the most. I flew through those pages!

Overall, I wouldn't readily recommend this book. However, I don't think you'll regret it if you check it out of the library if you have been eyeing it like I was.

**Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me an advanced copy of this book and in return I am submitting my unbiased and voluntary review and opinion. I am posting this review to my Goodreads account immediately and will post it to my Amazon & Instagram accounts upon publication.

Wow. Really well done thriller. Lots of twists and turns. You probably will not figure it all out. Left me totally satisfied!

Breathtaking, twisty, and impossible to look away! I love thrillers about mother daughter relationships, and this one was completely engrossing.

Do not start reading this book on a Sunday night. Seriously, don’t. Especially don’t do it if you have to get up early on Monday morning. You will not be able to put it down and you will end up getting no sleep. Trust me.
It starts somewhat slow, but then the speed picks up and the fast-paced page-turning will keep you glued to the pages. So much suspense, so many horrible events, so many lies and so many weird people, and then some twists and turns, most of them absolutely unexpected.