Her Last Goodbye

Her Last Goodbye is the second book in Melinda Leigh’s Morgan Dane series, the romantic suspense and legal thriller franchise that she launched in 2017. Morgan Dane is a former prosecutor who has returned to her small upstate New York hometown of Scarlet Falls to raise her three young daughters after the death of her husband in Iraq. Her partner in the series, both professionally and increasingly personally, is the private investigator Lance Kruger, a former Scarlet Falls police officer who left the department after a personal tragedy of his own.

In this entry the case begins when a young mother named Chelsea Clark disappears from a Scarlet Falls bar without telling her husband or anyone else where she was going. The husband Tim turns to Morgan and Lance for help when the local police treat the case as a low priority adult woman walking out on her marriage. As Morgan and Lance investigate, they begin to suspect that Chelsea did not leave voluntarily, and the case develops into the kind of escalating danger that Melinda Leigh’s romantic suspense reliably delivers.

Morgan herself is dealing with significant personal complications across the case. Her demanding work schedule conflicts with her responsibilities to her three young daughters. Her grief for her late husband Iraq veteran John is still very present. And her developing feelings for Lance are complicated by the obvious difficulty of fitting another person into the very full life she has been carefully managing since John’s death. Melinda Leigh handles all of these threads with the kind of emotional honesty that distinguishes her work from the more formulaic entries in the genre.

Melinda Leigh’s strength as a romantic suspense writer is the consistent quality of her plotting. Her female leads are usually capable women in difficult situations rather than damsels in distress. Her male leads are competent and respectful in ways that do not undercut the actual threat the antagonist poses. And her resolutions tend to feel earned because the obstacles she sets up are genuine ones that have to be addressed rather than waved away.

For longtime Morgan Dane series fans, Her Last Goodbye is a satisfying second entry that develops both the central romance and the wider mythology of the Scarlet Falls setting. For new readers, the series rewards being read in order starting with Say You’re Sorry, but Her Last Goodbye can be picked up as a standalone with some loss of context.