Before She Disappeared

Frankie Elkin has no friends, no ties – and not even a pet that might care if she fell off the face of the planet. She is a middle-aged loner, a virtual drifter, who rolls into each town or city, hitching a ride on the back of someone else’s desperation. Frankie has made it her life’s mission to search for missing people; the unimportant ones that, after that initial flurry of knocking on doors and putting up posters, the rest of the world has lost interest in.

This time she has landed in Mattapan, a dingy, somewhat dangerous part of Boston. To be of any use to her latest missing person, she needs a roof over her head and some kind of work, because the families of the people she looks for can never afford to pay her for finding their loved ones. So, even though she is a recovering alcoholic, she half-bullies Stoney, a man of few words, into giving her the job as bartender with free board in return for a few nights’ work per week.

Now all she has to do is find Angelique Bordeau, a Haitian teenage girl who disappeared from outside high school months ago. She is not surprised when the police department shows its teeth at her whenever she makes an unwanted appearance. Neither is she shocked that Angelique’s family is suspicious of her. After all, she’s a white woman in the Haitian quarter who asks too many impertinent questions. What concerns Frankie more is the absolute silence surrounding the missing Angelique. She is terrified she is going to be too late again.

There is a point where the ink flowing from an author’s pen spills a little too easily onto the page. This book felt a little formulaic, a little unpolished, a little underwhelming, despite the strong character development.

Frankie is not a character I warmed to, despite her clear heroism. She bored me with her constant referral to her recovering alcoholic status. Less of this would have made more impact. I found it extremely difficult to visualise her. Normally I shy away from too much description about characters. I don’t need the blue-eyes-blonde-hair minutiae. But it was almost as if Lisa Gardner couldn’t physically picture this character either and decided to leave it up to the reader.

On the other hand, I spent too much time inside the main character’s head. This did nothing to drive the story forward and even less to convince me of Frankie’s flaky raison d’être. The inevitable love-interest cheapened her character. There are certainly some heart-wrenching characters between the covers of this book, and I felt as if I had journeyed through the dark streets and dangerous corners of Boston. Gardner certainly knows how to bring character and mood to the inanimate.

This is an easy, cosy-up-by-the-fire read, with a sauntering plot, and despite Frankie’s lack of badge, Before She Disappeared is more a police procedural than a thriller, with shades of a whodunit, without much surprise when the baddie surfaces.