Silent Witness by Lindsay McKenna

After her husband’s death, Ellen Tanner escaped Washington D.C. and accepted a job in San Diego working for the Department of Defense. Her first assignment was working with Navy JAG Lieutenant Jim Cochran. Jim wanted neither a partner – especially a great looker – nor his latest assignment, a dead Top Gun instructor. To make it worse, the instructor was perhaps the most promising female officer in the Navy. As Jim and Ellen investigated her death, the had to determine if the death was suicide or if someone murdered her and made it look like suicide. But as they soon found out, the death was part of a larger conspiracy, which could shake the Navy to its very core.

This isn’t your traditional romance novel. The death of the Top Gun instructor affected both Ellen and Jim, who were driven to unravel the mystery behind her death. The investigation eventually allowed them to acknowledge their feelings for each other, but only near the end of the book. However as a reader, it really didn’t matter. Lindsay dragged you into the mystery – so much so that you didn’t care about the couple – you merely wanted to know what happened to the instructor and why. Once I started reading it, this book was very hard to put down. I was sorry it sat in my to-be-read pile for so long.

Details: HQN, November 2005

Bottom line: A great book