Burn this night A novel

The twists keep coming in this devilish PI mystery from Kenna (What Meets the Eye). Kate Myles left the LAPD after a spinal injury led to a painkiller addiction that cost her custody of her daughter. Struggling financially, Kate has returned to her childhood home, hoping to save enough money from private detective work to contest the custody decision. Then Kate's former colleague, homicide detective Harry Castile, contacts her via a genetics website and tells her that a person whose DNA profile matches Myles's is the prime suspect in the unsolved killing of teenager Lisa Forester, whose strangled corpse was found buried under a woodpile in Idlewood, Calif., 20 years earlier. Harry, who's eager to close the cold case, thinks the suspect must be a distant cousin of Kate's, and asks her to move to Idlewood to investigate. To make it worth her while, Harry recommends Kate to an Idlewood couple seeking a private eye to help exonerate their son, Jacob Coburn, who was accused of starting the fire that killed his sister, Abby. Kenna alternates chapters focused on Kate's investigation into the cold case with flashbacks that flesh out Abby's backstory, setting the two narratives on an unpredictable collision course. Lisa Unger fans will devour this. Agent: Liza Fleissig, Liza Royce Agency. (Nov.)

An ex-cop private eye whose ADHD is the least of her problems gets pulled into a cold case that's anything but. After learning that she's not her father's biological daughter, Kate Myles sends her DNA to a company she hopes will identify the sperm donor, or at least some of his relatives. She gets two leads: Myra Davies, and Jay W., who turns out to be a false flag for Harry Castile, a retired cop consulting with San Bernardino Homicide, whom Kate's worked with before. Harry submitted some DNA from the person who presumably strangled high school student Lisa Forester 20 years ago, and he wants Kate's help once more. She's not eager to work for free on the chance of convicting one of her biological relatives of murder, so Harry offers her a more lucrative side gig in the same neighborhood: serving as the investigator for attorney Richard Evans, whose client Jacob Coburn has been arrested for setting the Hillside Fire, a blaze that claimed two victims. Since Evans is convinced that Jake--whose life to date has involved one bad decision after another--fully intended to kill his sister, social work student Abby Coburn, the case seems hopeless. But it does give Kate an excuse to poke around in the mystery of Lisa's death, and Kenna the excuse to spin out a series of flashbacks as intricately layered as those in Kate's debut,What Meets the Eye (2022). In the process, Kate uncovers some truly unnerving suspects, and both Myra Davies and the father Kate finds play crucial roles in identifying them, though the final unmasking will probably surprise the detective more than her readers. Solid, heartfelt spadework into an alarming range of graves. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.