Gone Before Goodbye

Good mystery that keeps you guessing.

“You fly into Dubai for sketchy reasons. On your first night here, you, a single American woman in her forties, go to a nightclub alone. You claim you saw the stabbing of a rich man who no one else saw, who you happened to bump into and whose house you happen to have just been staying in before you arrived—and this all happened right after you met with his mistress at the same club…Do I need to go on?” This is the premise for Harlan Coben and Reese Witherspoon’s bestselling debut and propulsive thriller Gone Before Goodbye. “They wanted the best plastic surgeon money could buy. Maggie needed money and wanted to get back in the game somehow.” The bargaining chip: two patients, two surgeries–cosmetic surgeries. “The client’s mistress would be getting breast augmentation. And the client himself wanted some facial work.” The vetting: five million dollars deposited into her account at Merrill for taking the meeting. Another five million dollars when she finishes the job. But the über rich seek excellent medical care in the most discreet and clandestine manner possible. And they want Maggie McCabe. “Not the oligarch…His mistress. A woman named Nadia. She’s the one who specifically requested Maggie McCabe and only Maggie McCabe.” “She looks down at Oleg’s vacant chest cavity. Where there should be a heart, there is nothing but a yawning, bloodless void. It is a sight to behold, this threshold between death and life, between an ending and a beginning, between emptiness and hope. This chest is the emptiest of vessels and a promise waiting to be fulfilled…Her patient is a man with no heart, figuratively and, for the moment, literally. He is also, perhaps figuratively and literally, dead. Only she can bring him back to life. What would happen if she didn’t?” “A novel filled with global medical intrigue and massive corruption, all centered around a woman whose superpower is her surgical prowess,” literary surgeons Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben breathe Maggie McCabe to life with their “ability to shape an idea into a fully fleshed-out, page-turning thriller.” But who is the man in a baseball cap? Will death be avenged? Gone Before Goodbye demands a return!

I wish I could give it 4 1/2, it was a great book but almost too complicated at the end.

A fast-paced thriller that I enjoyed reading, especially the parts set in Dubai.

I went for the audiobook narrated by Reese Witherspoon and Chris Pine. I felt like the story was pushing the adrenaline of the events to be more dramatic to get the reader more thrilled with the twists of the plots but I found the actual storyline to be underwhelming and a bit overhyped. I think I would have preferred reading it over the audiobook. It felt more like a Netflix action movie than a slowly built up plot that had me invested. All the elements were there for a great book, I just didn't connect.