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In Southern California, beauty tends to feel conditional. It arrives wrapped in a warning label, sunlit hills that could ignite by nightfall, mountain towns where the air smells faintly of smoke even on windless days. It is in this uneasily combustible landscape that Alex Kenna has made her home and mined her inspiration. A former prosecutor and painter, Alex has come to crime fiction not through the leisurely route of literary daydreams, but by way of the courtroom, the canvas, and the kind of postpartum walks where the mind, deprived of adult conversation and rich in hormonal whiplash, begins to entertain dangerous thoughts.
Her latest novel, Burn This Night, is steeped in that strange alchemy, anxiety, artistry, and the forensic dispassion of legal training. The story unfolds in Idlewood, a thinly veiled version of the real-life mountain hamlet of Brightwood, where Alex once strolled with her infant son, casting imaginary bodies into snowdrifts. “When you have a baby,” she recalls with matter-of-fact unease, “you take a lot of walks and it’s boring, and so your mind starts going dark places.” Out of that maternal monotony came a question, half joke, half provocation: Should mommy kill here?
From that intrusive thought grew the kernel of a cold case, one made all the more vivid by Alex’s concurrent work in DNA training with the California Attorney General’s office. “I had DNA on the brain,” she admits. “I was that awkward person in the back asking weirdly specific questions about a particular death that no one was looking into.” In this overlap between the domestic and the procedural, the personal and the grotesque, Alex found her voice. The resulting book layers its narrative with a sense of dread specific to the West, a place where paradise is indistinguishable from kindling. “You’re living in a tinderbox,” she says. “That kind of anxiety was something I really wanted to bring into the book.”
Ever the trial strategist, Alex chose a dual-timeline structure, “risky,” she concedes, but necessary. “In law, you’re always thinking, What’s the most engaging way to present evidence?” A traditional mystery, she argues, risks tedium: too many pages of retrospective testimony, not enough heat. So instead of merely interviewing the past, Kenna plunges the reader into it. The novel splices the investigation led by her heroine, Kate Miles, with flashbacks told by the mentally ill Jacob, suspected of setting the fatal fire, and his sister Abby, one of its victims.
Giving the dead a voice is a deliberate disruption of crime fiction convention. Alex is pointed about the trope: the beautiful, dead woman whose life exists only to justify the hero’s arc. “I’ve written two books. I’ve killed two beautiful women,” she says, half-laughing, half-wincing. “I feel a little guilty about that, and I’m currently working on killing another one, but she’s a redhead this time.” Her guilt translates not into avoidance, but into empathy. Abby, the victim in Burn This Night, is rendered in full emotional color, charismatic, morally flawed, and emotionally complex. For the reader, her death is a rupture, not a device. “She had to go, unfortunately,” Alex says with grim affection. “But I wanted you to feel it.”
Kate Miles, her returning protagonist from the Seamus Award-finalist What Meets the Eye, is likewise built for emotional realism. A former cop turned PI, Kate is no paragon, she’s recovering from a painkiller addiction, struggling to reclaim custody of her daughter, and navigating motherhood with the missteps of someone still reassembling a shattered self. “I wanted an imperfect mother,” Alex says. Not the monstrous mother of melodrama, nor the sacrificial saint, but something harder to classify: a woman who is “fundamentally good” but trailing a cloud of bad decisions.
Kate also shares something personal with her creator: ADHD, rendered not as a quirk, but a core cognitive lens. “You can be very smart and competent at your job and then also go to the store and forget cheese and milk,” Alex explains, “but come home with eight kinds of impulse ice creams.” In this, as in much else, Kenna’s characters feel drawn not with the forensic neatness of genre convention, but with the messy precision of lived experience.
That texture, the sense of something both honed and human, may come from her past lives. As a prosecutor, Kenna spent ten years wading through the worst humanity has to offer. It didn’t leave her hopeful. “Oh, I have no faith in humanity,” she says flatly, then qualifies: most people, like most faces, are average. “You get a few saints, a few monsters, and the rest of us muddle through.” Gallows humor becomes necessary armor. She recounts a dinner with her parents where her frank trial talk prompted a woman at a neighboring table to complain, “I was in my happy place and then she sat down.” Kenna grins. “Sorry, lady. Didn’t mean to ruin your birthday.”
Her literary origins are as winding as her moral worldview. She studied art and art history, became an art dealer at twenty-three, and saw her income evaporate with the 2008 recession. Law school was a backup plan, though not one she embraced easily. “I remember sobbing, I’m gonna spend three years reading about rich a-holes shooting foxes.” It wasn’t until a summer internship at the San Francisco DA’s office, prosecuting a neo-Nazi for attacking an elderly homeless man, that she found purpose. “It was like a light bulb went off,” she says. “This is evil.”
Painting, once her first love, faded as her life filled with children and caseloads. The toxicity of oil paints was suddenly less romantic with toddlers underfoot. “I’m a messy painter,” she says. “It looks like I’m frosting a cake, it’s just everywhere.” Writing became the safer outlet. And her visual training? It still governs her instincts. “A blank canvas isn’t that different from a blank page. You have to make every corner interesting.”
Alex brings that aesthetic eye to her research, too. She scouts character homes on Redfin, absorbs the cadences of meth addiction through YouTube interviews. She writes, she says, for a reader “listening to an audiobook in L.A. traffic while screaming at their kid in the backseat.” The hope is simple: keep them turning pages. Keep them there. “Honestly, I just wanna write the kind of book you bring into the bathroom and stay for forty-five minutes.”
With Burn This Night, Alex Kenna has done just that, crafted a story that flickers with dread, aches with human complexity, and lingers long after the flame is out. In her world, beauty burns, but it leaves behind something more enduring: clarity, and maybe, a measure of dark grace.
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