The theme, “Previously, in romance…” could have taken me any number of places for this month’s TBR Challenge. My first thought was to read an old school romance, but I found I wasn’t really in the mood. Then I checked out Wendy’s ideas on the TBR page, and going back to a series I’d never finished definitely appealed to me. I’d read the first two Angie Pallerino books, but I’d never made it to book 3.

As soon as I sank into The Girl in the Moss, I wondered why I’d waited so long. I absolutely needed to see Angie and Maddocks get to their HEA, and the mystery in this book was set up quite well.

At this point in the series, Angie is no longer a police detective. After losing her job in disgrace, she is trying to get credentialed as a private investigator and also just trying to find her way in general. Her relationship with Maddocks is serious, but is also at something of a turning point, a plot point that we will see playing out in this novel.

As the story begins, Angie and Maddocks are on a getaway out in a rural corner of British Columbia. While the two are out learning to fly fish, they get pulled into a local resident’s discovery of skeletal remains. The deceased is assumed to have been the victim of an accident in the river, but Angie finds herself digging into the deceased woman’s last days – and perhaps uncovering a decades old crime.

All of this intersects with a cold case that Maddocks is working on with Angie’s former partner. I enjoyed seeing the jumps back and forth between the police work and Angie’s own investigation. Ms. White writes a good procedural, but she also brings the characters to life, and that’s a large part of why I liked this book so much.  I keep hoping Angie’s former partner, Kjel Holgorsen, will get another book. He clearly has some secrets and I want to know more.

One of the strengths of this book, and the series in general, is that the author doesn’t just fill her plots with action. She also shows the consequences of the mysteries her characters unravel. In this novel, we see Angie really coming to terms with her past and growing quite a bit as a character. While a reader could enjoy the suspense plot in this book as a standalone, one really needs to read the entire series in order to follow the character arcs and understand the leads and their inner circle.

Normally, my main quibble with this story would be that it’s mostly Angie’s story and that we don’t see James Maddocks on page nearly as often as one would expect in a romance. However, even though he is not physically there, his presence looms large over the story, and the relationship between these two drives much of it. When the book opens, the two are at something of a crisis point. Angie has to restart her professional life, and due to the trauma she has experienced, she has to either grow and move forward, or risk losing her romantic relationship as well.

Some of the scenes between Angie and Maddox early on in this book are so emotionally raw that they can be almost painful to read. I’ve seen plenty of “black moments” in romance, but Loreth Anne White evokes that sense of relationship crisis more realistically than many. Readers may go into this book knowing the conventions of genre romance, but Ms. White writes the crisis between the leads in this book so well that one cannot help wondering if an HEA will be possible.

The Girl in the Moss is a satisfying mystery, and one that lingered with me for a while after I read it. It’s a strong conclusion to a trilogy of good reads, and I can only hope that we’ll get more books set in this world.