Format: Hardcover, 400 pages
Release Date: January 19, 2021
Publisher: Dutton
Source: Publisher
Genre: Thrillers / Suspense / Mystery
From #1 New York Times bestselling author
Lisa Gardner, a propulsive thriller featuring an ordinary woman who
will stop at nothing to find the missing people that the rest of the
world has forgotten.
Frankie
Elkin is an average middle-aged woman, a recovering alcoholic with more
regrets than belongings. But 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, when the public no longer remembers, when
the media has never paid attention, Frankie starts looking.
A
new case brings her to Mattapan, a Boston neighborhood with a rough
reputation. She is searching for Angelique Badeau, a Haitian teenager
who vanished from her high school months earlier. Resistance from the
Boston PD and the victim’s wary family tells Frankie she’s on her
own—and she soon learns she’s asking questions someone doesn’t want
answered. But Frankie will stop at nothing to discover the truth, even
if it means the next person to go missing will be her.
Lisa Gardner's Before She Disappeared is the author's first standalone novel in, I believe 20 years. Frankie Elkin is an average middle-aged white woman, a recovering alcoholic with more regrets than belongings, who still suffers from the loss of a man who tried to save her. 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, when the public no longer remembers, when the media has never paid attention, Frankie starts looking. To date, Frankie has found 14 individuals.
Her new case takes her to D.D. Warren's stomping grounds of Boston. Almost a year ago, 15-year-old Angelique Lovelie Badeau disappeared without a trace. There have been no sightings, no leads, no breaks in the case, and as the days go by, no hope of finding Angelique alive. The first 48 hours are also critical to any investigation because that's when investigators have the best chance of following up on leads, before people's memories start to fade. After that, it becomes hope and lots of praying that the authorities find who they are searching for. Frankie’s investigation begins in the Mattapan neighborhood of Boston.
Mattapan is mostly a non-white neighborhood with dangerous gangs and criminals, so she already sticks out like a sore thumb. There are a lot of murders, non-fatal stabbings, and it’s a hot bed of gang activity. Each block may be held by different gangs. After contacting the reluctant family telling them that she’s there to help find Angelique and bring her home, Frankie takes a job at a bar called Stoney's. Stoney rents her the room above the bar in exchange for working there 5 days a week. She shares the space with a possibly psychotic cat named Piper who likes to leave presents behind.
Frankie gets blow back from the local Boston P.D. liaison to the Haitian community who doesn’t want her there. She meets Boston P.D. Detective Lotham who was primary investigator handling Angelique’s case and soon she’s proving more valuable than he thought. Finding the missing Haitian teenager becomes increasingly difficult Frankie comes to discover, but she won’t stop trying to uncover the truth. Then Frankie learns that Angelique’s brother mayhave plenty of information that has been ignored by the cops. Emmanuel may hold the key to finding his sister, but at what cost?
Gardner created a very realistic character in Frankie Elkin. Frankie is an alcoholic who travels the country searching for missing persons that the public has stopped looking for. In the beginning of the story, she just successfully found a girl who went missing even though the locals wanted nothing to do with her. This is a normal occurrence for Frankie. The police don’t like her interference, the family believe she’s out for fame and fortune, and yet she doesn’t take a dime from the families. Frankie, who has been sober for 9 years, struggles everyday to forgive herself for her past mistakes which I can honestly say I continue to do this day.
Frankie often puts herself in dangerous situations and we get small clues to her past throughout the book. The story takes some time to develop and it just seems to get stranger and stranger as a few new clues come to light. I was not close to figuring this one out and I did enjoy how it turned out. There was some wonderful secondary characters in this book from Stoney, who doesn’t know what to think about Frankie, to Val who is a happily married cook who works for Stoney, to Piper the cat who leaves presents for Frankie, to Detective Lotham who she has a curious connection to. I even liked Emmanuel who is highly intelligent and didn’t turn his back on Frankie when she asked for help. There were a lot of twists and great character development. I loved Frankie and I wouldn’t mind if the author came back to her in the future to see if she ever finds her own Happy Ending.
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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.
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