Close to the Bone (Widow’s Island #1) by Kendra Elliot @kendraelliot #bookreview #suspense

Title: Close to the Bone

Author: Kendra Elliot

Publisher: Montlake Romance

Publication Date: October 23, 2018

My rating: 4 stars

About the book:

From Wall Street Journal bestselling author Kendra Elliot comes the first novella in the thrilling Widow’s Island series.

FBI Special Agent Cate Wilde is back home on a remote Pacific Northwest island when she gets the call: a teenager’s skeletal remains have been found on a nearby island.

Together with Tessa Black, a childhood friend turned local deputy, Cate confronts dreary weather and bleak leads to make sense of the death. The complications pile up as Cate is distracted by the coroner on the case—and by nagging memories that draw her twenty years into the past. The remains suggest eerie similarities between this victim, and Cate and Tessa’s friend Samantha, who disappeared when she was fourteen.

Cate finds herself up against closemouthed locals, buried town secrets, and even her own heart. As the case unravels, will she be able to cut through the fog and find justice for the missing and the dead?

Close to the Bone by Kendra Elliot is the first book in the new romantic suspense Widow’s Island series. This series is all at novella length and penned by Kendra Elliot along with Melinda Leigh by alternating the books. This pair of authors have teamed up in the past for the romantic suspense Rogue River series of which a couple of the characters have moved over to this series but the books can be read and enjoyed separate from the Rogue River series.

This first book introduces FBI Special Agent Cate Wilde who has returned to the island after an injury to rest and recuperate. However Cate gets a call when a skeleton is found nearby and she is the only FBI close enough to cover the case quickly.

Cate teams up with her old friend now turned local deputy, Tessa Black. Cate and Tessa know that a local girl went missing recently and the remains could belong to her but they also know that twenty years ago a friend of theirs had also gone missing that was never found and this new case may be the break to knowing what happened all those years ago.

Close to the Bone was a great start to this romantic suspense series that even at the shorter length still contains all the elements of a good mystery to be solved. The characters and plot are fleshed out enough that one doesn’t feel the shorter length as you may with some novellas and gives just enough to get a reader hooked and ready to read the next in the series.

I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

Find this book online: 

Goodreads  /   Amazon

About the author:

Kendra Elliot has landed on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list mul­tiple times. She is the award-winning author of the Bone Secrets and Callahan & McLane series, as well as the Mercy Kilpatrick novels: A Merciful Death, A Merciful Truth, A Merciful Secret, and A Merciful Silence. Elliot is a three-time winner of the Daphne du Maurier Award and was an International Thriller Writers finalist and an RT Award finalist. She has always been a voracious reader, cutting her teeth on classic female heroines such as Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, and Laura Ingalls. She was born and raised and still lives in the rainy Pacific Northwest with her family, but she looks forward to the day she can live in flip-flops. Learn more at http://www.kendraelliot.com.