Frankie Elkin has dedicated her life to doing what no one else will: searching for missing people the world has forgotten.

When the police have given up, when the public no longer remembers, when the media has never paid attention, Frankie starts looking. She has found fourteen victims to date, but none yet alive. Traveling from city to city with more regrets than belongings, Frankie is drawn to a new case in Boston, and to a neighbourhood with a rough reputation.

Angelique Badeau, a local teenager and Haitian immigrant, vanished eleven months ago in the middle of the day from her high school.  No scrap of surveillance footage, no cell phone tracking; 
Angelique simply disappeared.

Despite resistance from the Boston PD and the victim’s wary family, Frankie starts to unpick the truth of Angelique’s disappearance and starts to discover there are those that don’t want these questions answered. But Frankie will stop at nothing to find Angelique and bring her home, even if it means the next person to go missing will be herself …

Review:

Charged, absorbing, and suspenseful!

Before She Disappeared is a well-paced, menacing thrill ride that takes us into the life of Frankie Elkin, a scarred, middle-aged woman who even while struggling with a past littered with grief, addiction, and heartbreak, travels from place to place identifying and pursuing new evidence in cold cases, but this latest investigation may have the highest odds yet with a missing teenage victim who may still be alive and the people who took her more than willing to kill to keep her.

The writing is sharp and meticulous. The characters are determined, ruthless, and resourceful. And the plot is a mysterious, compelling web of deduction, lies, exploitation, corruption, greed, violence, manipulation, and murder.

Before She Disappeared is another sophisticated, gritty, unnerving read by Gardner that may be the first standalone novel she’s written in a while but still has all the twists, turns, suspense, in-depth character development, and forensic analysis we’ve come to expect and love from all her previous novels.

This book is available on Jan. 21, 2021.

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