The Zero Night

Book Reviews

May 25

The Zero Night (Jonathan Stride #11)
By: Brian Freeman

[Fulfilled ‘Book with a missing person or disappearance’ for Shelf Reflection’s 2023 Reading Challenge]

Another great installment in the Stride series! Very suspenseful with some nice surprises! Kept me guessing til the very end.

Before I say anything else, allow me to calm your fears: There is a dog in this book that becomes a companion to Serena. I’m here to assure you, the dog does not die. I felt compelled to share this up-front because that could have been a deal-breaker for some of you!

Serena, Jonathan’s wife, plays a more central role in this book which I kind of liked. It helped me get to know her and her story a bit more.

There are two plot lines:

Serena, sober for 6608 nights and counting hits a low point when she is informed that her estranged mother has died. Estranged is a nice word. Her mother was abusive in a thousand ways but Serena still loves her in an incomprehensible way. This jarring news causes Serena to drink.

And there we have the ‘zero’ night where her sober days count begins anew.

The zero night is significant, not only for her fall from sobriety, but because while she is drunk that night she hallucinates something from a closed case a couple years ago. A case that hit a little too close to home and reminded her of her mom. This sends Serena back into the files to figure out what actually happened and to correct the case that she is beginning to believe she handled wrongly.

Meanwhile, Jonathan, recovered from the gunshot he acquired in Alter Ego, is brought back on the force to work an abduction of a woman who is still missing even after the ransom was paid by her husband. Her husband, a defense lawyer, knows he is a possible suspect. Can Stride and Maggie follow the evidence and get his wife back alive? And if they find her, can they prove what happened to her?

Comments

It was hard seeing Serena battling her demons and knowing the hold her mom had on her even after all the pain she caused. But it was also nice to see Cat and Jonny coming around Serena to support her and love her through it. That she was able to create a mother/daughter bond with Cat that both of them needed.

At first I thought the double plot-lines were going to be hard to keep straight or make the book seem disjointed, but that wasn’t the case. The ‘cases’ are very distinctive and since Serena is on one and Stride on the other, it’s not hard to remember what you’re reading about if you take breaks reading. Freeman does a good job of flowing everything together.

My only critique was that I wish a couple things at the end were shown a bit more dramatically than jumping forward and telling what happened in past tense.

One character introduced in this book is named Broadway and he’s very mysterious (in his illegal business). He seems like too big of an enigma, too big of a player, to just show up randomly in this book and slip away quietly into the night. I’m hoping he comes back up in the next book.

Recommendation

There is a bit of language and some of the content may be triggers for some who are trying to stay sober or who have encountered abuse, but overall I think this is a book most people will really enjoy. Everyone likes a thriller that’s a little unexpected!

This is part of a series, I’ve seen many reviewers say that this was their first read of the series and that they didn’t have trouble with it. I would agree that you can read this as a stand-alone, however I think it would behoove you to at least start back on book 6 or 7 (I didn’t like book 1).

I say this on every Freeman book I review, but if you haven’t read any of his books yet, I would definitely recommend you try them!

[Content Advisory: 20 f-words, 40 s-words; one brief sexual encounter; possible trigger warning for drinking after sobriety]

**Received an ARC via NetGalley**

This book released November, 2022. You can order a copy of this book using my affiliate link below.