Lisa Gardner’s new, stand-alone thriller Before She Disappeared is set in Mattapan, Boston.
Gardner is a best-selling author of 23 books and four short works, for which she has won several awards. She lives in the mountains of New Hampshire in the United States. She is an avid hiker, traveller, and cribbage player. Some her other books are The Other Daughter, Look for Me, Say Goodbye, Crash & Burn.
In Before She Disappeared, we meet Frankie, the story’s heroine, who has a difficult, haunted past. She battles daily with her struggle against alcohol, as she goes about her quests. She is searching for Haitian teenager Angelique, who has been missing for 11 months, and is almost forgotten, like many others that Frankie has gone looking for.
Frankie is a white, middle-aged woman, who just does not fit into the run-down Mattapan community she has to become part of. Her colour, her age, her work (bartender), are a jarring fit for the role she has carved out for herself. We learn that the key is to ask the right questions, to the right people, to persist, to understand, and to look for the obvious, that others just do not see.
Risking all, is Frankie able to re-unite Angelique with her brother, before she herself becomes a statistic? The Boston PD are not convinced. There seems to be another missing teenager, that no one has even noticed or reported missing. How does she fit into the mystery? Will Frankie find Angelique?
Yet again, a compulsive, well-written book, filled with interesting characters from Lisa Gardner. Believable and worth reading. - Christine E Hann
Before She Disappeared is published by Century, Penguin Random House UK – 2021. ISBN: 978-1-529-12442-2
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