The Zero Night by Brian Freeman
Series Name: Jonathan Stride Mystery #11
Genre: Police Procedural
Release: November 1, 2022
A woman has been kidnapped.
Now Jonathan Stride must decide if her husband wants her back . . . dead or alive.
After nearly dying of a gunshot wound, Jonathan Stride has been on leave from the Duluth Police for more than a year. When his partner, Maggie Bei, gets called about a suspicious abduction involving a local lawyer, she tells Stride it’s time for him to come back.
Attorney Gavin Webster says he paid $100,000 in ransom money to the men who kidnapped his wife. Now they’ve disappeared with the cash, and she’s still missing. Gavin claims to be desperate to find her—but Stride discovers that the lawyer had plenty of motive to be the mastermind behind the crime.
Even as Stride digs for the truth about Gavin Webster and his wife, he must also deal with a crisis in his own marriage.
His wife, Serena, is struggling after the death of her mother, the abusive woman she hadn’t seen in twenty-five years. When she loses control at a crime scene and draws her gun on a fellow cop, Serena finds herself kicked off the Webster case. Alone at her desk, she begins hunting through old police files and starts to ask questions about a mother’s death that was written off as suicide. That death haunts Serena like an echo of her own childhood—but her obsession with it takes a terrible toll.
As Serena shuts him out of her despair, and his own investigation grows increasingly tangled, Stride wonders whether going back to his detective work was the right decision. But all he can do is keep moving forward. Because Stride fears the Webster kidnapping may be only one part of a horrific murder conspiracy.
And it’s not over yet.
Dru’s Short Musing:
This well-written, fast-paced and action-packed drama quickly became a page-turner as I could not put this book down.
Serena and Stride are at a crossroad in their lives but when two separate cases and death knocks on their door, the vulnerabilities and their fierceness take center stage as they tackle the perspective cases. The author knows how to tell a complex story where the visually descriptive narrative puts you in the middle of all the actions and a variety of emotions are awaken as the solid plot plays out on the page and all you can do is sit back and follow along with what the author has intended. As this story reached a fevered pitch, the abundance of plot twists, some that gave me pause, enhanced my reading pleasure. When all was said and done, this book blew me away and I did not want it to end. I wanted more Stride and Serena. This is by far, the best book in this terrific series.
FTC Full Disclosure – I received a digital ARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.