Her Last Day, T.R. Ragan

Jessie Cole didn't plan to become a private investigator, but when her sister disappeared, her passion to find her shaped her career.  T.R. Ragan introduces Jessie in Her Last Day.  She's a private investigator with a penchant for getting into trouble and a knack for tracking down missing persons.  When a local eccentric man hires Jessie to find his missing daughter, she never expected that her search would bring her into contact with the Heartless Killer, an elusive serial killer who has been terrorizing Sacramento for years.

She teams up with Ben Morrison, a local crime reporter who suffers from amnesia due to an accident ten years ago. . . . about the same time Jessie's sister disappeared. . . . Hmmm. . . .  As they pursue their investigations, it becomes clear to both of them that the stories are more involved than they realized.

I enjoyed Ragan's characters, who have high degree of complexity in their backgrounds but aren't over-the-top caricatures.  The one over-the-top character, the Heartless Killer, was inexplicably malevolent, to a disturbing degree.  As she developed him and his twisted ways, I thought, "If he's the villain throughout this trilogy, I might be done after this one."  But, unlike her Faith McMann trilogy's cliffhangers, Ragan wraps this one up nicely.  She leaves some questions about the characters unanswered but brings the case to a conclusion.  Her Last Day is a promising start to the series.