Frankie Elkin is a skinny, petite white woman—with a complicated relationship with alcohol and a massive savior complex. In Boston’s immigrant-populated Mattapan neighborhood, she stands out like a lighthouse on a dark sea. So what the hell is she doing there?!
Well, Frankie specializes in missing persons—specifically, cold cases where the police have already failed. So far, she’s found fourteen people. Every single one of them dead. But with Angelique Badeau, a Haitian teenager who disappeared eleven months ago, maybe—just maybe—things will be different this time…
Before She Disappeared is the first book in Lisa Gardner’s Frankie Elkin series.
The Power of Personality
If you’re not a towering, unstoppable muscle-bound force like, say, Major Jack Reacher (see: Lee Child’s Die Trying), who typically extracts information from reluctant witnesses and suspects with a well-placed, bone-rattling punch, then you’ve got no choice—you’ll have to rely solely on the power of your personality.
And that’s exactly what Frankie Elkin does.
Every time you think, Okay, that’s it, she’s done for—someone’s about to kick, stab, or shoot her in the ass, Frankie somehow manages to talk her way past suspicious family members, reluctant witnesses, and wary cops. And just like that, the case of the missing girl takes on new life.
An Exotic Setting and a Twisty Investigation
The charm of Before She Disappeared comes from both its unique setting and Gardner’s unconventional protagonist with her equally unconventional methods. Frankie navigates a neighborhood that is anything but welcoming to outsiders, pushing forward against constant resistance, while Gardner paints a vivid picture of the community and its people.
In an era of mass-produced crime fiction, originality is never a bad thing. And in this regard, Before She Disappeared passes with flying colors.
The investigative process is also impressively crafted, following in the footsteps of the best procedural thrillers—stories that focus on the meticulous and realistic work of solving a case. Frankie, along with the initially hostile but increasingly cooperative Detective Dan Lotham, systematically re-examine the long-cold leads.
But sometimes, what a cop fails to uncover, a determined, skilled civilian can still dig up.
How to Ruin the Ending of a Crime Novel
It’s no secret that when it comes to crime fiction, the ending is the make-or-break moment. If all the suspects gather in a room while the brilliant detective explains the impossible (see: Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express), that can get a little dull.
If a big, badass action hero kicks down the door and guns everyone down, well, that’s not always the most believable solution either.
So, the best option is the golden middle ground, right?
Well, Before She Disappeared doesn’t go for that. (Sigh.) Instead, it goes for the second option.
Frankie Elkin as an action hero? Ridiculous, right? Exactly. It completely undermines the book.
How to Ruin the Whole Damn Story
But Before She Disappeared has even bigger problems than its botched ending. Around the halfway mark, you start getting the sneaking suspicion that this missing person case might be way less significant than it initially seemed. And guess what? You’re absolutely right!
Because if a “missing” person is actually just wandering around the city, casually dropping cryptic riddles for the desperate people searching for them, that raises a few questions. First and foremost: Why the hell don’t they just say exactly where they are?
There are books where you finish reading and think, It was good… except for the ending. The author really messed that up. But the conclusion of Before She Disappeared doesn’t just fumble—it turns the ENTIRE story on its head.
Lisa Gardner’s book is solid for about 90% of the way. But the ending? Utterly baffling. It’s as if Gardner asked an endlessly kind-hearted yet hopelessly naïve friend to come up with a convoluted, original crime for her. (Or, more likely, that naïve person was Gardner herself.)
And so we end up with criminals you just can’t take seriously. Criminals so incompetent they actively draw attention to themselves with unnecessary kidnappings. Criminals who take a simple white-collar scheme and overcomplicate it to the point of inevitable failure.
And let’s not forget the terrifying, ruthless ex-con who… turns out to be a complete moron. Even though he could have solved the whole thing with three bullets.
The crime behind Before She Disappeared is the kind of thing a moderately competent high schooler could pull off after class for some extra pocket money. Which makes kidnapping someone over it seem, frankly, absurd.
Final Verdict
Lisa Gardner introduces a talented and determined female protagonist with her Frankie Elkin series. Before She Disappeared is an atmospheric, unique crime novel—up to a point. But its weak and shockingly dumb ending retroactively wrecks everything it had built up until then.
Rating: 7.3/10
Before She Disappeared (Frankie Elkin #1) by Lisa Gardner
400 pages, Hardcover
Published in 2021 by Dutton
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