Walking on Her Grave

Walking on Her Grave is the seventh book in Melinda Leigh’s She Can series, the romantic suspense franchise that established her as one of the more reliable producers in the genre. The series follows a rotating cast of investigators, mostly former military or law enforcement, working private security and consulting cases in the eastern United States. Each book centers on one couple while the wider cast moves in and out of the action.

Leigh’s strength as a romantic suspense writer is balance. The mystery and the romance get roughly equal weight, neither rushed nor padded, and the suspense plotting is solid enough to satisfy readers who would otherwise stick to straight thrillers. The female leads are usually capable women in difficult professional situations, the male leads are usually competent and respectful in ways that do not undercut the danger of the antagonist, and the emotional beats land because Leigh takes her characters’ interior lives seriously.

The She Can series has a fairly reliable structure. A crime in the opening pages, a personal connection that pulls one of the leads into the case, a slow building investigation that turns up more than the local police want to admit, and a third act in which the antagonist becomes a direct threat to someone the protagonists love. By book seven, Leigh had refined this structure to the point where it works almost like clockwork. The reader knows roughly where the book is going and the pleasure is in the specific characters and the specific case.

For readers who enjoy Karen Rose, Allison Brennan, or the romantic suspense end of Catherine Coulter’s catalogue, Leigh is squarely in the same neighborhood. Walking on Her Grave is a strong entry that can be read as a standalone, though longtime fans will appreciate the appearances by characters from earlier books in the series.