A review by booksrbrainfood
Before She Disappeared by Lisa Gardner

4.0

I have enjoyed this author in the past so this was no surprise that I liked this book as well. The story follows our protagonist, Frankie Elkin, an white, middle-aged alcoholic with no specific law enforcement training, who has been sober for over nine years but still battles daily with her sobriety and her demons. She is a free spirit who found out that she is uncannily good at finding missing persons. She moves around the country and inserts herself into a community to find these folks. On her 15th case, she has come to Boston, MA and finds herself looking for a missing girl, Angelique, who is now 16 and who has been missing for 11 months. The neighborhood Angelique is from is poor and high crime with many immigrants from Haiti who came to escape the remnants of the earthquake. The Boston PD are still technically on the case but how much effort they are giving is questionable. Frankie's super power seems to be the ability to connect with a wide range of people, even those from massively different backgrounds and who would normally shut out someone who they deem "from somewhere else". She meets a cast of characters who are charming and flawed and heroic and many other things that make them feel like real people.
I completely tore through this book having picked it up from our local bookseller this past week and then picking it up to read Friday and not wanting to put it down.
I was confused many times throughout the story because there are parts that describe past events in Frankie's life that made me continually question whether this was a standalone or part of a series. I never found evidence of prior books with this character but let me know if y'all know of some. This could certainly become a series if it isn't already, very much in the Jack Reacher style.
Happy reading!