This is not my favorite unfortunately because I love this author when she cowrites.
Spoilers ahead - I think I shouldn’t have listened to this right after binging Scamanda because I instantly caught onto Ruby and her plan. I thought the story was slow between the reveals and wasn’t shocked by any of them.
Also, I wouldn’t recommend the audio. The narration is flat and it was so hard to keep the characters straight because there were no changes in tone or anything between character switches. Really would’ve benefited from dual narration.

What a great book!!
I listened non stop until I finished!
The entire complex story kept me on the edge of my seat!
And the narrator was superb!
Thank you NetGalley and the publishers for an advanced audiobook copy.
5 big fat stars!!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the gifted audiobook in exchange for my honest thoughts!

I love this author, so I was super excited to pick up this book. I found it to be a bit of a slow burn for me, the first half was pretty slow, but the second half was a lot more fast paced and exciting. I feel like there were a couple elements to the story that didn’t make it a lot of sense to be in the book. I did love the mother daughter experience in this!

As far as the narration, I love the actress Kate Mara but found the narration to be a bit flat. I enjoy different characters having at least somewhat different tones, especially when they’re different ages, but she kept it all one tone.

This was an absolute read for me as a fan of RuthPekkanen and Green Hendricks’s books! I had the opportunity to listen to the audible, which kept me in my car longer than I needed to be on multiple occasions.

Thrillers are my new favorite, and I love reading/listening to them and trying to figure out what’s coming next; I am never right!

This book is told in dual POV - Mother (Ruth) and daughter (Catherine). They have a relationship that is so close that they often find each other having the same thoughts, saying the exact words. A young single mother who loves her too, maybe a little too much?

Catherine has worked hard and finally landed her dream job as a nurse at Johns Hopkins University Hospital. She’s gong to move away from her mom. She has worked in a nursing home caring for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients for years. She’s a bit worried about her mother as she sees similarities between her and the patients she cares for.

There is so much more here than meets the eye. The twists and turns of Ruth’s life before she had Catherine has fueled her unreasonable need to be close to her daughter - at all times.
Catherine begins to see a different side of her mom, and her life as she knows it begins to unravel, and I was there for every heart-wrenching, twisty, turny moment.

I went into the book Blind, and I think doing that is much better! I was on the edge of my seat for hours listening! There is a slow-building story, and I found this to be riveting and one of the best thrillers I have ever listened to. The narrator did a fantastic job differentiating her voice for both mother and daughter. She brought them to life!

A slow- burn thriller that amps up the suspense more towards the end.

Interesting having a mother and daughter that don’t trust each other and there are a few times when I just could trust Ruth.

As her past is revealed through her journal entries we understand why she keeps herself isolated and is so over protective of Catherine.

The slow-burn aspect was hard for me as I prefer more fast paced thrillers. I did find it predictable as well. Those two things dropped its rating a little for me. There were definitely great suspenseful moments I really enjoyed and trying to figure it out and the ending was interesting.

Overall, I enjoyed it. The mystery unraveling and the end. The audiobook was done really well.
Thanks to Macmillan audio and netgalley.

This was not my favourite of the books I’ve read by Sarah Pekkanen. It was a slow moving mystery which I appreciated. However, I didn’t feel like the plot was interesting enough. I feel like the part about the mother faking Alzheimer’s was a little bit much for me. And then we spent too long with the past and the killing of the coach. Before then I really liked the past chapters. But once we got to that point I felt like we just dragged the story line until the end. And that’s not that far into the book when the coach dies. In the end, I felt underwhelmed.

Audiobook Review: Sarah Pekkanen’s Gone Tonight

An intense, harrowing thriller about long-buried secrets and the trauma they inflict….

I finished this one in three days, as it was my morning walk/dinner prep companion. It felt like I flew through it!

The mother-daughter dual narration kept me listening and wanting to know what both characters were hiding from one another. Kate Mara did a phenomenal job with the narration, and I knew what was going on quickly, so I could bump up the speed to x 2 after only a few chapters. Mara’s voice for audio thrillers is gold!

Pekkanen wrote a tense, intelligent thriller that concludes with some sweet little twists I didn’t see coming. If you like Karen Slaughter’s Pieces of Her, give this one a go.

This book was amazing and really got me hooked like 3 chapters in.

Ruth and Catherine are mother daughter, living paycheck to paycheck, Ruth one day experience symptoms of memory lose, Catherine thinks her mother is to young, when her mom refuse to do the scan Catherine starts looking in to her mom and her history she knows nothing about!

Ruth aka Ava Ran away and changed her identity to hide from that terrible night that changed the course of her life, she had been preparing for the day he returns.

I couldn’t put this book down I loved it. Nice twist on this book all around would read!! Thanks NetGalley for the advance audio of this book!!!

First of all, Kate Mara had the perfect voice for such a chilling read. As the book goes back and forth between two different point of views, she did a beautiful job conveying the emotion between them both.
Overall I enjoyed the book, but I found the pace to be a bit slow for my taste. If you like a slow burn, you will enjoy this one.

I was so excited to read this one and see how Sarah Pekkanen did on her own. I loved it. It started out seeming like contemporary fiction but by 30%, the twists started coming and the suspense didn't let up until the very end. It really shows just how far a mother will go to protect her child and her secrets.

Thank you to NetGalley, Sarah Pekkanen and publishers for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

More like a 3.5 but rounding down.

Loved the element of Alzheimer's in the thriller. I feel like this gave me Pieces of Her vibes but way better. I did find this book rubbing me the wrong way towards the end and I'm not sure why. I've read other books by this author when she was writing with Greer Hendrix and I will say I much prefer her writing as a standalone author. Will def pick up more books in the future under Sarah Pekkanen.

Catherine and her mother, Ruth, have always been a team. They take care of one another and it's always been them against the world. When Ruth begins showing signs of early onset Alzheimer's, Catherine, who works with elderly patients with memory loss, notices some of Ruth's behavior doesn't quite line up. She starts to question her mother's current mindset as well as her past, something she's never done before.

I really liked this one! I was excited to try a book only by Sarah Pekkanen because I loved her books with Greer Hendricks - I have to admit, this might just be one of her best! I loved the dual POV and how we never really knew if we could trust Ruth. There were times I felt like I was reading a more mature version of Ginny & Georgia, a show I absolutely adore! I couldn't wait to see how things would unfold and I wasn't disappointed. I was totally engrossed in this story and definitely recommend it.

My only complaint surrounded this book is around the narration - Kate Mara did a great job but I do wish that either (1) there was a second narrator so that the two characters had different voices or (2) Kate changed her voice for one of the women so they could be easily distinguished. There were times when I didn't know whether I was in Catherine's or Ruth's chapter and it took me a moment to mentally figure it out, which got a little tiresome. If a reader is on the fence about picking up the audiobook vs the physical book, I would probably steer them towards the physical for that reason. Overall I still loved the book but that one change probably would have made this a 5-star read for me.

4.5 stars rounded down!

4.25 ⭐️

The newest psychological thriller by Sarah Pekkanen (one of the authors of the dual that brought you The Wife Between Us and The Golden Couple) features a mother trying to protect her daughter from big secrets. Ruth Sterling is not who she appears to be. She has lived much of her life running away from her past in an effort to protect her daughter. When Catherine’s job tries to take her somewhere new, Ruth will do anything to prevent Catherine from getting hurt. But is Ruth trying to protect her daughter from someone or from herself?

I listened to this one on audio and it kept my attention throughout. It was less fast paced than I had anticipated but felt more mysterious than thrilling. I was intrigued throughout trying to determine Ruth’s past and what she was hiding.

I would advise caution in some areas for readers, namely sexual violence.

Overall, this was an enjoyable thriller and I will read anything this author writes.

Thank you to #netgalley and #stmartinspress for an advanced listening copy. This book releases on 8/1


Things you will find in this book:

-unreliable narrators
-dual POV
-family secrets
-murder plotline
-mother-daughter relationship
-teen pregnancy
-slow burn thriller

Overall pretty decent! Definitely slow for the first 30-40%, but the pace picks up and stays up for the rest of the book. My only real complaints were the ending revelations about Catherine felt wholly unneeded and that the audiobook could have benefitted from 2 separate narrators. Ruth's past POV gets muddled with Catherine's voice and can be hard to tell apart when coming back to the audiobook after a day or two.

I was very excited to read Gone Tonight by Sarah Pekkanen because I really enjoyed her previous books co-written with Greer Hendricks. This is a slow burn burn thriller about Catherine and her mother Ruth who has a mysterious past. I think this one was too slow for me. I enjoyed the dual points of view from daughter to mother as we learn Ruth’s secrets. I listened to the audiobook and the narrator Kate Mara was great but it would have been an even better production with two narrators. Not my fave but I’d still definitely read her next book.

This book was such a different storyline, I loved every minute of it. I really enjoyed the 2 alternating POVs and how the story was paced out to get to the ending. Not many twists and turns but still a story that kept me hooked from beginning to end.

3.5*
This definitely more of a slow build. There was something missing for me though, I'm not sure what it was. Maybe there wasn't enough of a thrill. I did like the narrator.

This was my first read by this author and I split my time reading and listening with a preference of audio. The first half was really good but I felt the second half slipped a bit. It might have related to the consistent back and forth of chapter-by-character sequences along with a homestretch story that seemed slightly far fetched and only mildly climatic. Great epilogue! For the audiobook, the narrator was good but not great.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity in exchange for an honest review.

Ruth Sterling has been hiding a dark secret from her daughter, Catherine since she was born. Now, that Catherine is grown and moving away Ruth has no choice but to tell Catherine everything before Catherine finds out herself and puts both of them into a dangerous situation, if it's not too late already.

Chilling and emotional read as you feel torn between Ruth and Catherine and ones desire to protect while the other resents the secrets.

In this mother daughter POV Pekkanen shows off her talents once again. Keeping readers engaged with twists you thought you were ready for. The secrets, the past, the hiding are all catching up to Ruth.