Gone Before Goodbye

Gone Before Goodbye (2025) is a medical thriller from bestselling author Harlan Coben and actress, producer, and author Reese Witherspoon. The novel follows Dr. Maggie McCabe, a brilliant but disgraced surgeon who accepts a mysterious offer to perform a secret surgery and is thrust into a global conspiracy. The novel explores themes including The Allure of Danger, The Corruption of Idealism, and Technology and the Elusive Nature of Truth. The novel is Witherspoon’s fiction debut, and it draws on her personal background; her parents served in military medical roles, inspiring the story’s focus on surgeons working in high-stakes environments. Coben is an internationally recognized author of suspense novels, including Home (2016), Fool Me Once (2016), and Nobody’s Fool (2025). He has won the Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony Awards, with dozens of his works adapted into popular Netflix series. Witherspoon is the founder of the media company Hello Sunshine and the influential Reese’s Book Club.

This guide is based on the 2025 Grand Central Publishing first edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of graphic violence, substance use, addiction, illness, death by suicide, and death.

Plot Summary

Dr. Marc Adams, a cardiothoracic surgeon, is operating on a 15-year-old boy named Izil in a refugee camp in TriPoint, North Africa, as it comes under attack. His colleague, Trace Packer, urges him to evacuate, but Marc refuses to abandon his patient. He reflects on his relationship with his wife, Maggie McCabe, and a recent near-death encounter in which their guide, Salima, saved them from a militant group called the Child Army. Marc sends his team away and stays to finish the surgery. As armed militants storm the operating room, he sees Trace for the last time.

One year later in Baltimore, Maryland, Maggie reluctantly attends a scholarship event at her alma mater, Johns Hopkins, honoring her recently deceased mother. She copes with her grief over Marc’s death by conversing with an AI “griefbot,” a sophisticated app created by her sister, Sharon, that uses Marc’s digital footprint to simulate his personality. At the event, Maggie feels ostracized by former classmates, including Steve Schipner, who now works at a Dubai clinic called Apollo Longevity. Her former mentor, the renowned cosmetic surgeon Dr. Evan Barlow, approaches her with a mysterious and lucrative job offer in New York City, insisting on secrecy.

Maggie discusses the offer with the Marc griefbot and then returns to the home she shares with Sharon and her nephew because of their family’s overwhelming debt. She arranges to take the train to New York to meet with Barlow but withholds the details of his author from Sharon. She also contacts her father-in-law, Porkchop, and arranges to see him while she is in New York. 

Porkchop picks her up at the train station in New York, and she insists they first stop at Trace Packer’s apartment. Inside, she sees a prototype of the THUMPR7, an artificial heart that she, Marc, and Trace developed through their now-defunct charity, WorldCures Alliance. She also finds a bill for three large, unspecified safe deposit boxes in San Francisco. She texts a photo of it to Trace but receives no reply.

The next day, Barlow sends a car for Maggie, and she is taken to a secret surgical facility where her phone is confiscated. Dr. Barlow introduces her to Ivan Brovski, a liaison for a wealthy Russian oligarch. Brovski offers Maggie $10 million, plus the immediate settlement of her and her sister’s debts and her pending malpractice suit, to perform cosmetic surgery in Russia. As soon as Maggie accepts, the money is deposited into her account, and she feels that she cannot change her mind. Before she leaves with Brovski, she calls Porkchop, who asks to speak to Brovski to ensure her safety.

Maggie is flown on a private jet to a remote, opulent palace in Russia, where she meets the notoriously reclusive oligarch, Oleg Ragoravich. He gives her a tour of his lavish estate and introduces her to the second patient, his young mistress, Nadia, for whom he requests breast augmentation. In a private conversation with Maggie, Nadia reveals that she speaks English, although no one at the estate knows, and shares a story of having sold a kidney at 16 to save her family. 

Maggie is then shown an operating room that is an exact replica of her own former OR at Johns Hopkins. Brovski reveals that he is Oleg’s personal physician and briefs her on the procedures: facial reconstruction for Oleg, including a custom 3D-printed nose scaffold, and breast augmentation for Nadia. Later, Brovski confiscates Maggie’s phone after catching her talking to the Marc griefbot.

At a lavish ball that evening, Maggie meets Charles Lockwood, an American doctor who knew Marc. Lockwood reveals that Oleg Ragoravich was the secret funder of WorldCures through a front organization. When Maggie confronts Oleg, he denies this. He also warns her that Nadia is a liar, implying that he knows she can speak English. 

The next day, Maggie performs the facial surgeries on Oleg. During Nadia’s breast augmentation, she discovers a tattoo on Nadia’s thigh identical to a unique one Marc had. After the procedures, she finds Oleg missing from his recovery room and the palace staff in a state of panic.

Brovski tells Maggie she must leave immediately. He returns her phone, claiming to have deleted the griefbot app. In her room, Maggie recovers the app from a hidden folder. The AI Marc warns her that Oleg’s men plan to kill her by throwing her from the helicopter that Brovski wants her to board. He gives her a phone number to call and tells her to trust the person on the other end. 

Maggie escapes through a window and is pursued by guards. She places the call but doesn’t have time to talk to whoever is on the other end. She steals a Ferrari from Oleg’s showroom but crashes after being shot in the shoulder. 

Maggie is rescued by Charles Lockwood, who reveals he is an intelligence agent investigating Ragoravich, and AI Marc had given Maggie his number. He explains that WorldCures was used by Ragoravich as a front for money laundering and organ harvesting, and that Marc had become his informant. Lockwood presents three theories about Marc’s death: he was a random casualty, Ragoravich had him killed, or he faked his own death to escape. He tells Maggie that Trace is missing and may be trying to find Marc.

Lockwood sends Maggie to Dubai to find Trace, providing her with a fake passport under the name Emily Sinclair. Using a photo archive, Maggie recognizes Nadia as Marc and Trace’s guide, Salima, at the TriPoint camp. 

Maggie finds Nadia at an exclusive nightclub, where, Charles told her, Nadia used to be an escort. Maggie confronts Nadia, who admits that she is Salima and is in love with Trace, showing Maggie his mother’s emerald ring. Nadia explains she requested Maggie as their surgeon because she suspected Maggie’s involvement in Trace’s disappearance: He vanished after telling Nadia he was flying to Baltimore to see her. During their confrontation, a disguised and injured man whom Maggie recognizes as Oleg appears and is stabbed in the crowded club. Maggie’s report to the police is dismissed.

Maggie tells Nadia that she has a plan to get them into Apollo Longevity. She gets Steve Schipner’s number, and he agrees to meet her there the following day. The next day, Maggie and Nadia go to Apollo Longevity. Steve tells them that Trace broke into the facility five months ago, stole WorldCure’s research, and flew to Washington, DC. 

As news breaks that Oleg Ragoravich’s body has been found, Nadia helps Maggie flee to London. On the plane, Maggie receives old photos of Ragoravich from Sharon and realizes that she performed the surgery on Oleg’s body double to make him look more like the real Oleg, setting him up to be killed. A location tracker from Nadia shows Brovski has landed in Bordeaux, France.

Maggie meets Porkchop in London, and they travel to a vineyard in Bordeaux, the site of Ragoravich’s new research facility. There, Maggie confronts the real, terminally ill Oleg, who confirms that he faked his own death and that Trace was his lead surgeon for organ harvesting. He threatens Porkchop’s life to force Maggie to perform a heart transplant on him using the THUMPR7. Maggie performs the groundbreaking surgery, assisted by a mysterious surgeon who vanishes afterward. 

As she leaves, Nadia confronts her with a gun, still believing she killed Trace. Porkchop intervenes, confessing that he killed Trace after learning Trace was on his way to kill Maggie to silence her. Porkchop lets Nadia go.

Weeks later, Maggie returns home and tells Sharon to delete the griefbot for good. She meets Porkchop and reveals that she knows he was already in France when she called him. Porkchop confesses the full extent of his deal with Ragoravich: In exchange for the THUMPR7 technology that Trace stole, he secured money, their safety, and revenge. He also reveals that Sharon had warned him that Maggie took her father’s gun, intending to kill Trace herself. His confession implies that the “beating heart” used for Ragoravich’s transplant was harvested from Trace before Porkchop killed him.