Book Review: Before She Disappeared

Synopsis:

New York Times bestselling author Lisa Gardner launches a new thriller series featuring Frankie Elkin, a woman who will stop at nothing to find the missing people that the rest of the world has forgotten

Frankie is a middle-aged recovering alcoholic with more regrets than belongings. She has no home . . . she can fit all of her possessions into one suitcase. She spends her life doing what no one else will — searching for missing people the world has stopped looking for. When the police have given up, the public no longer remembers, and the media has stopped running stories, Frankie starts looking.

A new case brings her to Mattapan, a tough Boston neighborhood, in search of Angelique Badeau, a Haitian teenager who vanished from her high school months ago. The resistance she encounters from the Boston Police Department and the victim’s wary family tells Frankie she’s on her own. And s

Soon Frankie learns she’s asking questions that someone doesn’t want answered. But she will stop at nothing to discover the truth . . . even if it means the next person to go missing could be her.

Review:

Lisa Gardner is the best-selling author of more than twenty suspense novels, including her popular Detective D.D. Warren series. She has now penned the first volume in another series at the heart of which is a strong female protagonist. But Frankie Elkin, unlike D.D., is not a trained professional. Rather, she’s an ordinary woman with a troubled past . . . and a mission.

Gardner says that most of her plots are inspired by actual events or persons. And Before She Disappeared is no exception. She happened upon an article about a woman who gave up everything to pursue cold cases involving missing persons. Lissa Yellowbird-Chase believes that too many missing children of color are forgotten, their cases never solved. So she takes on those cases herself. Gardner found her story “inspiring” and “a bit mesmerizing,” and wondered, “What would that look like?” Thus, the character of Frankie Elkns was born.

The fictional D.D. Warren is a Detective with the Boston Police Department, a city in which Gardner formerly resided. Frankie once “had a house, a car, a white picket fence . . . ” Gardner does not explain what happened, but Frankie has no home now. Rather, she goes wherever the cases lead her and volunteers her time. She has no interest in payment or recognition, and has so far solved fourteen cases without finding a single missing person still alive. Most recently, she located the body of a twenty-two-year old woman locked in a her vehicle at the bottom of a lake. She had been missing for eighteen months. Usually, Frankie finds her next case online, frequenting chat rooms and forums where family members and friends join “crazy people like” her to discuss the investigations conducted by local authorities, and share theories and information. Frankie doesn’t own a computer. Instead, she visited the library in the town where her last case concluded.

That has led her to Boston, a city she has never previously visited, in search of Angelique Lovelie Badeau, who was fifteen years old when she disappeared eleven months ago. She walked out of school on Friday afternoon, but never arrived at home. “No sightings. No leads. No breaks in the case.” Her friends call her Angel, but she is LiLi to her family.

Mattapan is a Boston neighborhood with the largest Haitian population in the United States, aside from Florida. It is also a rough area populated by poor working people, replete with gang activity and violent crime. That doesn’t deter Frankie who arrives determined to find a job and apartment, and commence working the case. She is particularly interested in cases involving minorities.

Frankie is an alcoholic who needs to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings regularly in order to safeguard the sobriety she has maintained for more than nine years. She explains, in the first-person narrative Gardner employs, that she “gave up drinking and took up always being on the move instead.” She grew up in a small Northern California town. Her father also drank and her mother worked two jobs in order to support the family. And a man named Paul saved her until she grew strong enough to save herself. She thinks about Paul frequently, but Gardner does not reveal the nature of their relationship or what happened to him. Gardner describes Frankie as “haunted,” and “living outside the norms of society — and yet in doing so, finding herself. She is not who the world expects her to be, but she is exactly who she needs to be.” She is an endlessly fascinating character, in part because Gardner only offers periodic clues to what motivates her to lead the life she does.

The mystery at the core of this first volume is intricately crafted and populated by intriguing supporting characters. Gardner’s story implicates societal issues including immigration, racism, and human trafficking, and is propelled forward at an unrelenting pace as she adds layers of complications, motives, and characters with reasons to keep Frankie from locating the missing girl. She narrowly escapes danger more than once, as she seeks to understand how exactly LiLi went missing, given all of the ways that people’s whereabouts are tracked in urban areas. A fifteen-year-old leaves clues through social media, a cellular telephone, friends, and camera feeds located throughout the neighborhood, yet LiLi vanished.

My name is Frankie Elkin and finding missing people is what I do. When the police have given up, when the public no longer remembers, when the media has never bothered to care, I start looking.

Frankie indeed takes a job in a bar that includes a small, furnished upstairs apartment. An aggressive cat named Piper is included in the deal. Stoney, the owner, is “a man who’s seen it all and lived to tell the tale” and can “communicate volumes with a single eyebrow,” and he seems to appreciate Frankie and her demons. Frankie’s efforts are at first met with skepticism by LiLi’s family and, initially, derision by Dan Lotham, the lead detective on the case. But Frankie works to ear the trust of LiLi’s family and Lotham recognizes that Frankie gets results — she has a knack for getting information from people who refuse to cooperate with the authorities — and if the two of them work together, they might make progress. Because Frankie has no special skills or training, is not a licensed private investigator or affiliated with the local police department, she is not bound by procedures designed to ensure that the rights of subjects or witnesses are not trampled. She can and will submit requests for information in conformity with the Freedom of Information Act or ask the families of the missing to authorize the release of specific documents if law enforcement officials refuse to share information with her. She is committed and determined, and has “a gift for asking the right questions” that Lotham respects and decides to capitalize on. And their attraction is immediate and palpable, but Frankie clearly enunciates her circumstances to ensure that their expectations are manageable and realistic. “Good guys like him have a weakness for train wrecks like me. Just ask Paul,” she wryly notes.

Frankie is determined that LiLi’s case will be her first real success — she will find the missing girl alive and return her to her family. But she has to stay alive herself in order to do so. With Before She Disappeared, Gardner lives up to her well-earned reputation as “the master of the psychological thriller.” Frankie is a uniquely intriguing, credible character to whom readers will find themselves immediately drawn and invested in her well-being as they strive to understand her. And transfixed to see if she succeeds and, perhaps, decides to remain in Boston with a handsome detective.

Before She Disappeared is Gardner at her very best, which means it is a page-turner that leaves readers clamoring for the next installment.

Excerpt from Before She Disappeared

Chapter 1

The water feels like a cold caress against my face. I kick deeper down into the gloom, my long hair trailing behind me like a dark eel. I’m wearing clothes. Jeans, tennis shoes, a t-shirt topped with an open windbreaker that wings out and slows my descent. My clothing grows heavier and heavier till I can barely flutter my legs, work my arms.

Why am I in clothes?

Wet suit.

Oxygen tanks.

Thoughts drift through my mind but I can’t quite grab them.

I must reach the bottom of the lake. Where the sunlight no longer penetrates and sinuous creatures lurk. I must find . . I must do . . .

My lungs are now as heavy as my legs. A feeling of pressure builds in my chest.

An old Chevy truck. Dented, battered, with a cab roof sun-bleached the color of a barely lit sky.

This image appears in my mind and I seize it tightly. That’s why I’m here, that’s what I’m looking for. A sliver of silver in the lake’s muck.

I started with sonar. Another random thought, but as I sink lower in the watery abyss, I can picture that, too. Me, piloting a small boat that I’d rented with my own money. Conducting long sweeps across the lake for two days straight, which was all I could afford, working a theory everyone else had dismissed. Until…

Where is my wet suit? My oxygen tank? Something’s wrong. I need… I must…

I can’t hold the thought. My lungs are burning. I feel them collapsing in my chest and the desire to inhale is overwhelming. A single gasp of dark, cloudy water. No longer fighting the lake, but becoming one with it. Then I won’t have to swim anymore. I will plummet to the bottom, and if my theory is right, I will join my target as yet another lost soul never to be seen again.

Old truck. Cab roof sun-bleached the color of a barely lit sky. Remember. Focus. Find it.

Is that a glimpse of silver I see over there, partially hidden by a dense wall of waving grasses?

I try to head in that direction but get tangled in my flapping windbreaker. I pause, treading my legs frantically while trying to free my arms from my jacket’s clinging grip.

Chest, constricting tighter.

Didn’t I have an oxygen tank?

Wasn’t I wearing a wet suit?

Something is so very wrong. I need to hold the thought, but the lake is winning and my chest hurts and my limbs have grown tired.

The water is soft against my cheek. It calls to me, and I feel myself answer.

My legs slow. My arms drift up. I succumb to the weight of my clothes, the lead in my chest. I start to sink faster. Down, down, down.

I close my eyes and let go.

Paul always said I fought too much. I made things too hard. Even his love for me. But of course, I didn’t listen.

Now, a curious warmth fills my veins. The lake isn’t dark and gloomy after all. It’s a sanctuary, embracing me like a lover and promising to never let go.

Then . . .

Not a spot of silver. Not the roof of an old, battered truck that was already a hundred thousand miles beyond its best days. Instead, I spy a gouge of black appearing, then disappearing amid a field of murky green. I wait for the lake grasses to ripple left, then I see it again, a dark stripe, then another, and another. Four identical shapes resting at the bottom of the lake.
Tires. I’m looking at four tires. If I wasn’t so damn tired, I’d giggle hysterically.

The sonar had told the truth. It had sent back a grainy image of an object of approximately the right size and shape resting at the bottom of the deep lake. It just hadn’t occurred to me that the said object might be upside down.

Pushing through my lethargy now, urgency sparking one last surge of determination. They’d told me I was wrong. They’d scoffed, the locals coming out to watch with rolling eyes as I’d awkwardly unloaded a boat I had no idea how to captain. They called me crazy to my face, probably muttered worse behind my back. But now…

Move. Find. Swim. Before the lake wins the battle.

Wet suit. The words flutter through the back of my mind. Oxygen tank. This is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. But in my befuddled state, I can’t make it right.

I push myself forward, fighting the water, fighting oxygen deprivation. They’re right: I am crazy. And wild and stubborn and reckless.

But I’m not broken. At least, not yet.

I reach the first tire. Grab onto the slimy rubber to get my bearings. Quick now, not much time left. Rear tire. I crab my way along the algae-covered frame till I finally reach the front cab.

Then I simply stare.

Lani Whitehorse. Twenty-two years old. Waitress, daughter, mother of a three-year old. A woman with an already long history of bad taste in men.

She’d disappeared eighteen months ago. Runaway, the locals decided. Never, her mother declared.

And now she was found, trapped at the bottom of the lake that loomed next to the hairpin turn she drove each night after the end of her 2 a.m. bartending shift. Just as I had theorized while pouring over months of interviews, maps, and extremely thin police reports.

Had Lani misjudged the corner she’d driven so many times before? Startled at a crossing deer? Or simply nodded off at the wheel, exhausted by a life that took too much out of her?

I can’t answer all the questions.

But I can give her mother, her daughter, this.

Lani dangles upside down, her face lost inside the floating halo of her jet-black hair, her body still belted into the cab she’d climbed into eighteen months ago.

My lungs are no longer burning. My clothes are no longer heavy. I feel only reverence as I curl my fingers around the door handle and pull.

The door opens easily.

Except…doors can’t open under water. Wet suit. Oxygen tank. What is wrong, what is wrong… My brain belatedly sounds the alarm: danger! Think, think, think! Except I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.

I am inhaling now. Breathing in the lake. Welcoming it inside my lungs. I have become one with it, or it has become one with me.

As Lani Whitehorse turns her head.

She stares at me with her empty eye sockets, gaping mouth, gleaming white skull.

“Too late,” she tells me. “Too late.”

Then her bony arm thrusts out, snatches my wrist.

I kick, try to pull back. But I’ve lost my grip on the door handle. I have no leverage. My air is gone and I’m nothing but lake water and weedy grasses.

She pulls me into the truck cab with unbelievable strength.

One last scream. I watch it emerge as an air bubble that floats up, up, up. All that is left of me.

Lani Whitehorse slams the door shut.

And I join her forever in the gloom.

Rumble. Screech. A sudden booming announcement: “South Station, next stop!”

I jerk awake as the train lurches to a halt, blinking my eyes and looking down at my perfectly dry clothes.

A dream. Nightmare. Something. Not the first nor the last in my line of work. It leaves me with a film of dread as I grab my single bag and belatedly follow the rest of the passengers off the train.