Her Last Goodbye

Morgan Dane and Lance Kruger have been dancing around each other for a while now, but still haven't found enough of a reason to take their relationship to the next level. Soon enough, though, they are hired by Tim Clark, whose wife, Chelsea, has gone missing and the police have centered their investigation on him. Morgan and Lance focus their inquiry on the possibility that Chelsea has been kidnapped. When one of their suspects begins to stalk Morgan, she and Lance ramp up their investigation as well as their relationship. Her Last Goodbye is a very good suspense story with a little romance thrown in the mix. Several events throughout the story keep the pages turning in order to find out what has happened to Chelsea and who the criminal is. Unfortunately, the relationship between Morgan and Lance only occupies a small part of the book, as the mystery develops and moves the story quickly forward. The reader is taken along throughout the investigation, but the third person POV keeps the characters at arms length instead of bringing them to life. Overall, Her Last Goodbye is enjoyable and keeps the reader guessing right to the very end.

Great mix of mystery, murder and love.

Err...yeah...it was okay. The plot was stronger than the first book in the series and there were some good moments of tension, but I didn't really feel very much about any of the characters. Not that I'm particularly used to feeling anything for the characters in these generic crime-fiction titles, but aside from the Dane family (whose members we've been getting to know well in both the first and second books) everyone else just seemed to lack the depth required to really feel invested. And the bad-guy was very cookie-cutter in a lot of ways. As with the first book, there seemed to be more telling than showing in the last 30 pages, which is annoying and not remotely engaging. But it was an improvement on the much more hurried denouement of book one. I didn't actually realise until I was about a quarter of the way through this book, that it was characterised as 'Romantic Suspense' - if I'd known ahead of time, I wouldn't have ever bothered starting to read the first title. I'm not some sex-starved, desperate, hormonally-imbalanced harpy who needs the vicarious voyeurism of annoying romance titles. I hate reading books with a romantic element shoehorned into them. It's like the author just sort of felt compelled to include the details to ramp up the excitement missing from the rest of the plot. All the couple-stuff between the 'woman-who-is-the-perfect-mother-as-well-as-being-a-lawyer-trained-in-marshal-arts-whilst-being-stunningly-beautiful-kind-and-with-an-awesome-sense-of-humour' meets the 'guy-who-is-the-perfect-mixture-of-apparently-gorgeous-wounded-hero-who-totally-loves-and-respects-the-hot-chick-as-well-as-being-an-awesome-son-and-totes-willing-to-be-father-figure-to-her-brats'...that whole shtick just makes me gag. Get bent. I read crime-fiction to get some good, old fashioned, twisted, graphic, violence and sadistic mind games from believably sick bad characters. I want nasty details of torture, not drawn out 'will-they-won't-they-okay-they-just-did-now-they're-a-power-couple' bollocks. This stuff is supposed to be my escapism; taking me on a fast-paced trip through stuff I will hopefully never encounter in my life. Getting laid is not something new to me and I have zero interest in reading about whether fictional characters will or won't hook up. Just give me blood, guts, evil, twisted, rotten, sadistic bastards and leave the mushy crap for the vacant, the desperate and the bored. Don't know if I'll read the next book or not. I know I said the same thing after the first book, but to be honest, I'm still working on getting my focus and concentration on important, serious or challenging material back to how it was, thanks to my meds playing havoc with my moods, energy and sleep patterns. Reading book two, was just too easy. I wanted a quick and simple piece of nonsense to retrain my brain, so it will get used to sitting and reading for longer periods of time; so it can retain larger chunks of information. This book wasn't difficult at all. I learned nothing, wasn't remotely challenged or engaged enough to care about any of the characters. But it counts towards my reading challenge goal and it served well enough as a few more baby steps on the road to full mental acuity and a regaining of my faculties.