In the first book in the Frankie Elkin series by Lisa Gardner, readers are introduced to a woman in her mid-forties whose one main goal and purpose is to help find missing people. This is a weird character because Frankie is not a professional private investigator nor a part of some retired police force. All of her experience, of all 14 cases prior to this one, has been cultivated all on her own. Frankie literally wanders from town to town, wherever her next missing person case may take her. She has no home to call her own. She lets no romantic relationship drag her down. Furthermore, she’s a recovering alcoholic with not much in life savings, and everything she owns can be carried in a suitcase. Very interesting indeed…

In Before She Disappeared, Frankie travels to Boston to find a missing teenager, Angelique, who seemingly just vanished one day after school. It has been almost 11 months since her disappearance, and the police is no closer to finding out what happened. It’s about to be a cold case and, therefore, a perfect case for Frankie to step right in. All of her previous cases have resulted in no victims being found alive, and so she’s desperately wanting to change that with Angelique. I personally like the mystery, although I do find it a bit hard to believe in Frankie’s character and motivations at times. It’s really hard to believe that someone is willing to sacrifice everything and dedicate their every day to searching for missing people that she has not one ounce of relationship with. But I do admit that it makes for a pretty interesting backdrop. At the end of the book, the author does note that she got the inspiration to write this series mainly because she herself discovered a real-life group of people that actually do dedicate themselves to helping find missing people. Maybe they won’t go as far as Frankie here in the novel, but it’s good to know that there are good people out there doing this type of work.

I’m satisfied with the overall pacing and story. Frankie doesn’t rely too much on technology and instead relies more on old school investigative techniques, mainly by asking the right questions to the right people and actually listening to them. Her progress proceeds at a steady pace with nothing too frantic. The mystery is good, with the author dropping some major hints along the way. It was, however, still a pleasure to read it all the way through. All in all, I think Before She Disappeared makes a pretty solid debut for Frankie Elkin. It’s not every day we get to read a mystery crime novel starring a character such as Frankie herself. In addition, due to Frankie moving to a different location as soon as her current case is solved, it allows her to meet and likely team up with different people for each and every new case. This hopefully would eliminate the staleness of having to read of the same characters each and every time.