Gone Before Goodbye – Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben

When a disgraced surgeon is offered the opportunity to operate again, while clearing all of her family’s debts and pending lawsuits at the same time, she jumps at the chance.  Flown to Russia, she completes the work on both of her patients but then feels like something isn’t right.  Barely escaping with her life, she is taken to Dubai, where she teams with a secret girlfriend of her missing colleague to try and find him and find out what really happened when her husband was murdered.

Actress Reese Witherspoon teams with prolific author Harlan Coben for Gone Before Goodbye, their first collaboration and nominee for the 2026 Goodreads Choice Award for Favorite Mystery & Thriller.  Having never read anything from either one before, it is hard to tell how much input Witherspoon had on the finished product.  It was a quick, if somewhat muddled, read, having the bones of a good story but dropping some of the execution.  While this could have been a good introduction to Coben and his many works, I don’t really feel the need to seek out more from him at the moment.